


Catch-Tag

by Carlough



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Fae & Fairies, M/M, Road Trips, cracky angst, longfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-04 05:38:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 55,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carlough/pseuds/Carlough
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Babe and Bill go on a magic-induced road trip to locate their fellow reincarnated members of Easy Company to hopefully save some lives.  They have a year for Babe to tag every person on his list.  If he wins, everyone gets their memories back. If he loses, he dies.  Problem is, nobody is allowed to know what he's up to, or he forfeits his life.</p><p>At the same time across the nation, men are finding themselves with strange marks.  Connecting to each other through the internet, they find that they are the tagged in an old fey game called Catch-Tag, and someone is out there right now, risking their life for them.  Desperately they search to discover more of their shared pasts and find out how they can save the life of someone who is trying to save theirs.</p><p>Or, Babe and Bill's Not-So-Excellent Faeries-Suck Cross-Country/Trans-Global Reincarnation-Is-Not-a-Fun-Time Adventure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Doyle Brothers’ Traveling Carnival of Mystical Wonders, or Why Elderly Carnie Women Are Not to Be Trusted

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to make a note here that, given my large number of unfinished stories, many of which I haven't touched in months/years, I had originally not wanted to post this at all until it was at least finished, and then I would consider it. But a friend of mine who I've been sending the chapters to and, because I'm kind and benevolent, I will not name, kept saying, "You should post this. So are you posting it? Have you posted it yet? Do it, DOOOOOOOOOOOOO IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT."
> 
> And she knows I have no sense of self-restraint and I love this fic a little too much, so here we are. If you have read the tags, you'll see references to a lack of timeline. That's because it's a reincarnation fic, and some of these guys, bless them, are still alive and kicking. NOTE: I do not own Band of Brothers, and I most definitely do not own the lives of those men represented in the series; this is based on the actors' portrayals in the not-completely-historically-accurate-thank-God HBO series. As such, I only reference their lives post-war to say that given a natural timeline, nobody would be getting reborn anytime soon; if anything this fic should be taking place about thirty years from now. But anyone who knows me knows I absolutely despise anything that takes place in the future. So this is taking place now, and we're going to ignore how that logically would not make sense.
> 
> This is pretty cracky. You should know that now. Jamie=Babe, Mike=Bill, and they very well may be OOC. I'm excusing this with the fact that they've grown up outside of war, but still, read at your own risk. Some people are reincarnated as other roles their actors played. Most aren't, and sorry, at the moment Winters and Nixon are on that list. Some have lives inspired by their roles in other stuff, but very few are actual crossovers. Sorry to disappoint (or not).
> 
> And at the moment, I'm trying to keep ahead of the posting schedule. Knowing me, this won't last long. I'm going to post weekly/one-and-a-half-weeks/biweekly/I don't know, when I feel like it. We'll see.
> 
> Yes, the title is dumb as hell. ~~Bill~~ Mike acknowledges that next chapter.

"Hey Jamie! Jamie! You see this shit? They got one of those slingshot rollercoasters!"

There were exactly two things of which James Carson was sure when it came to the month of June: First, the Doyle Brothers' Traveling Carnival of Mystical Wonders would roll into town promptly in the second week and set up shop next to the old cemetery where St. Finnegan's used to be, just as schools were letting out and parents were looking for any place,  _anywhere_ , to shove their hyperactive children for the day. Admittedly, the Doyle Brothers' Carnival hadn't changed much since its creation back who-the-hell-knew-when (it was one of those carnivals with such an original feel that some said it really was around back during the heyday of freak shows, something the carnival felt no need to dispute) and was thus appropriately seedy, dangerous and politically incorrect, but that's all excused when getting a yearly bout of tetanus is part of a  _tradition_.

The second thing he knew without a doubt was that Michael Lucarelli, his best friend since birth, would go to said carnival and get absolutely, impossibly, and very likely inhumanly hammered, in what he assured Jamie was also a measure of tradition. Of course, Jamie was the only one to know that the tradition was having its fifth anniversary today; Mama Lucarelli would have a heart attack to know that her youngest baby boy had been out getting drunk off his ass since he was sixteen, which had always been Mike's way of cajoling Jamie into keeping his secret – well, that, and he knew what  _really_ happened to Mrs. Cartwright's favorite cat.

Keeping in step with the aforementioned traditions, it also fit that Jamie was the one to drag Mike's drunken ass home at the end of their day-long carnival trip. He couldn't help throwing up a thank-you to God that he and Mike shared an apartment and could both legally drink now; trying to sober Mike up before delivering him to his doorstep as teenagers was not something he would ever like to repeat again, thank you very much.

Sadly for him, Mike saw their newfound legality, as both had turned twenty-one over the past two months, as the perfect time to do absolutely  _everything_  that the Doyle Brothers' had to offer, all in one day, and with added alcoholic fun.

"Mikey, they always have one of those, and besides, I don't want you puking on me when it does the loops backwards."

Mike appeared to be mortally offended, which he probably was. "James Carson!" he slurred loudly, his violent listing to the left as he pointed at Jamie with his beer ruining his attempt at an imposing stature. "I have never once been unable to hold my liquor! Ever! I'm the beer king!"

"You puked all over me yesterday morning when I tried to roll you out of bed for your shift at the garage."

"Morning!" Mike crowed, slinging a warm arm around Jamie's shoulder and tugging him in close. He smelled like his typical mixture of booze, cigarette smoke and sweat, and Jamie only avoided making a face thanks to over two decades of constant exposure and desensitization. "I puked on you yesterday  _morning_. That's hangover time, Jamie-boy, and hangover time is free game for spewing chunks. But I don't ever toss my cookies  _while_  I'm drinking."

From his facial expression, Jamie decided that either the very idea greatly insulted him or he was feeling mildly constipated. Possibly both. He decided not to think about it too hard. Instead, he took advantage of that arm over his shoulders and tried to turn his friend towards the exits, a difficult feat when you're trying to maneuver a Michael Lucarelli-sized dead weight.

"I'm still not getting on that coaster with you, man. The guy operating it looks even more hammered than you, and I didn't know that was humanly possible."

As if he had heard Jamie's remark, the man in question abruptly turned and narrowed his eyes at them, even going so far as to lift his eye-patch so his empty eye socket could scrutinize them too. Mike, ever the people-pleaser, grinned widely at the grizzled man and gave him a waving version of the one-fingered salute. For reasons Jamie would never understand, this just made the man smile widely as he gave them a proper wave in return.

 _Carnies_ , he thought with a sigh. It was best to just leave them be and save yourself the headache of ever trying to puzzle them out.

Shaking his head, Jamie steered Mike on towards the parking lot, having to first elbow and navigate his way through the narrow aisles of crowded stalls infested with tchotchkes, bad attempts at art and items that were all claimed to have some sort of magical property. He'd always hated this section the most, because it was a huge magnet for the out-of-towners and also had to be passed through to reach the exit, a setup the carnival had used with malicious glee for as long as anyone could remember.

Which meant that trying to push your way through the throngs of people buying shaman-blessed unicorn statues and emo dragon paintings while supporting your drunken best friend was a bitch.

"I'm awesome at making friends," Mike muttered into the collar of Jamie's jacket in regards to his new one-eyed BFF.

"Sure you are," Jamie grunted, wheezing as someone apparently just as desperate to escape as he was elbowed him harshly in the gut. Honestly, why did Mike always come out of these mobs looking as fresh as a (albeit very drunken) daisy while he looked like he'd joined a fight club?

Eyebrows drew together in a Mike version of a pout. "I am. I'm fucking charming."

"I never said you weren't."

He slapped Mike's hand away when he started to reach out towards a display of glass orbs, all labeled as some different variety of a crystal ball. The last thing he needed was for Mike to get distracted by something shiny, and Christ above if he broke one, Jamie was just dumping his ass here and leaving him to it, he was not in the mood to argue over blame and prices with an elderly Carnie woman again. He still hadn't regained his pride after losing last year's beatdown.

"But you're thinking it!" As if to prove this, Mike felt the intense need to poke his best friend in the face with his beer bottle. "Twenty years, Jamie-face, I know when you think I'm full of shit."

"You mean all the time?"

"Shut your trap, I'm spewing meaningful words of wisdom and shit here."

"Or you're just spewing shit."

Mike tried to slap the back of his head and missed miserably while also throwing himself off balance, pulling both himself and Jamie to the ground in a spectacular flail of arms, legs and an afghan with a griffin on it yanked from a nearby stand. The owner of said afghan looked at them reprovingly as Jamie tried to quickly apologize and pull the blanket out from under Mike, who was once again distracted by colors and pretty pictures.

"I'm sorry ma'am, I am so, so sorry," Jamie muttered quickly as he rolled Mike partially under the purple sheet covering the stand like a tablecloth to get at the afghan, which he shook out, brushed off and handed back to its testily waiting vender with a fast smile. "Good as new, right?"

The elderly woman (and really, why were all these Carnie women seventy going on seven hundred?) scoffed at him and rolled her eyes as she snatched back her blanket and checked it over for any damage, as if she could sense that Jamie was the type of person who had no qualms about lying to old women which, okay, he was definitely not, that was one time and the less Sister Mary Francis knew about the frog that may or may not still be living it up in the men's locker room of St. Joseph's Catholic High School, the better.

"I'm not so sure the griffin would agree," she grumbled in a rough voice characterized by the general Carnie Accent for Old Women, which was a strongly affected hybrid of a 1970s sitcom portrayal of a gypsy woman and Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle.

Jamie watched her expectantly for a moment, waiting for her to pass judgment. She scrutinized the blanket, glanced up at him and sniffed derisively. "Is not too horribly damaged," she muttered with an almost disappointed air.

 _Success_.

That was one less ridiculously expensive and atrociously tacky fantasy craft for Jamie to be guilted into buying; his older sister the English major was so confused when she got a broken-winged dancing pixie statue for her birthday last year. Then Jamie told her the broken wings symbolized the shattering of human ideals, and she thought it was the best gift ever, which was great, because he had to spend the money he was going to spend on her gift buying it after Mike crashed through  _that_ stall.

He needed better friends.

"Jamie! Jamie, check this out!" Speaking of Mike he was still half-under the purple sheet, apparently having a fantastic time lolling around on the popcorn-and-is-that-vomit?-covered ground.

Throwing the still-glaring elderly woman a grimace, Jamie reached down, fished under the table with one hand and dragged Mike back out. Whatever Mike had found, he must have felt it was very important, because he came out clutching it tightly to his chest.

"Dude, you gotta see this," he slurred, accent thickening to the point where if that wasn't Jamie's own South Philly accent too, he would have assumed Mike had forgotten how to speak English.

When he held up his prize for his friend's viewing, however, the elderly Carnie woman behind them made a sharp noise of disapproval.

"Is not yours!" she barked, immediately moving to wrench the object from Mike's hands before he could get a good view of it. All he could see as she tugged it from his friend's grasp was what looked to be a rather large brown leather-bound book with worn, uneven pages.

Mike made a noise like a wounded animal and leaned heavily on the purple stall as he pulled himself staggeringly to his feet. "But I found it! Why the hell wouldya bring it if you're not gonna let people take a look at it?"

She sniffed as if he was not worth her time, which was not a reaction Mike got from most any woman (for some reason Jamie could never quite comprehend, everybody from the little five year old Castiglione twins up the block to his own seventy-nine year old grandmother thought that Mike was just the most charming young man they had ever met, even once they'd seen him sloppily drunk and swearing like his vocabulary solely consisted of four letter words, which admittedly it usually did when he was sober too). The woman then gave Mike her most scathing glare, which even Jamie, not currently the subject of her ire, shuddered under.

She could teach Sister Mary Francis a thing or two. God forbid the two old broads ever met.

"Do not talk of what you do not know. Book is special, very special, and you are an idiot."

Elderly Faux Gypsy/Pseudo Russian Woman was now Jamie's new favorite old lady, which was okay, because his grandmother had already proclaimed Mike her favorite grandson, which really, what the hell, Grandma?

"I was just looking at it," Mike grumbled, eyebrows pulling together as he ground his teeth in his own version of an annoyed pout. "Thought it looked cool."

"Which is why you are an idiot," the woman reiterated. "Book is not to be disturbed because it is 'cool.' Is to be used for intended purposes only."

Finding himself interested in what about a book could have caught Mike's attention, seeing as the most reading he ever did without an incentive involved the model profiles in porno mags, Jamie peered closer at it from where the woman held it in a stranglehold in her arms.

It was indeed a veritable tome of tanned, weathered and uneven pages bound in soft-looking dark brown leather. What likely caught Mike's attention were the gilded letters shining on the cover in some language Jamie didn't recognize, and the beaten-up golden clasp securing the book closed.

"What's the intended purpose?" Jamie found himself asking before he could stop himself, curiosity weighing out over his wish to grab Mike and get the hell out of there.

Now the woman's attention was back on him. "Not of concern," she dismissed him.

But then she paused for a moment, and Jamie would have sworn the temperature in the air dropped a few degrees. He glanced towards Mike to see if he had noticed it, but his friend was still glowering at the old woman, leaning heavily on the table. How did he not notice how suddenly the air was sharp, almost painful to inhale? It felt charged, acidic, like the time before an oncoming electrical storm.

The woman stared as if unseeing for a pregnant moment, fingers of one hand stroking lightly over the book's cover almost unconsciously, but her other hand held the book in a harsh white-knuckled grip. Then, with startling accuracy, her gaze snapped to meet Jamie's.

"Actually," she began in a softer tone, almost pensively, "May be of great concern to you."

Feeling a headache coming on and his ability to deal with crazy elderly not-Gypsies dwindling in the oncoming night, he raised an unamused eyebrow. "Come again?"

Her gaze flitted from Jamie to Mike and back again before she nodded decisively, setting her sights definitively on Jamie and giving him a heavy look. "Yes, is for you." With that, she thrust it into Jamie's arms, forcing the air out of his gut with the sudden weight to his abdomen.

"Why does he get to hold the book?" Mike whined from his right, now seeming to be testing if the stand could hold his weight as he sat curiously on its edge.

"Because I do not trust idiots with book." She paused for a moment, scrutinizing Jamie before saying, "You are slightly less of an idiot."

He didn't know if he should feel pride or insult. He chose to stick with the former, because Mike was making annoyed grumbles, which was always amusing.

"Book is for you," the woman repeated to Jamie, her unimpressed façade both a comment on his lack of attention to her apparently important message and a judgment on his character. "Is not mine. I receive it long ago, as a girl. I was told to keep book safe until I find who it is for. I find who it is for, I give it to them. Now I give it to you, because book is for you."

"That's very nice of you, ah, ma'am, but I don't need your book-"

"Was not an offer," she growled, smacking Jamie upside the head and ignoring his yelp of surprise. "Book is yours. Now shoo, I have customers who will take good care of my griffin." Indeed, a tourist couple complete with matching fanny packs appeared to be quite interested in her afghan, and she watched them with a smug sort of pride.

"Has protective properties," she informed them with a too-bright smile, to be met with enraptured nods. The man even lifted his camera to snap a picture of her.  _Joke's on them_ , Jamie thought with glee, seeing as their picture would be complete with Mike's bitchy expression just over her shoulder, like a pissed-off gremlin with a wicked underbite.

The book weighing heavily in his arms, Jamie glanced down at the worn cover before staring at the woman in confusion. "Who the hell are you?"

She sniffed derisively once more, flipping a multi-colored scarf over one shoulder. "You may call me Madame Doyle."

This drew Mike's attention, and he and Jamie shared a disbelieving glance.

"Doyle?" Mike squinted at her. "You mean like…?" He pointed at the marquis over the entrance, reminding people to join the Doyle Brothers again next year.

The woman made a face before flipping a disinterested hand at them. "Distant cousin. Now leave, I have customers."

With that she turned her back completely on the duo, who could only share another glance before Jamie shrugged, sighed and shifted the book under one arm before hefting Mike's arm over his opposite shoulder.

"Come on buddy," he said, "time to finish the drunken shuffle."

"I don't need your help," his friend groused, even as he leaned heavily into the redhead's side.

"Sure you don't," Jamie muttered under his breath as the pair made their way, thankfully uninterrupted, to Mike's exceptionally shitty car.

Settling Mike into a heavy lean against the rust-speckled frame that very well could cause it to collapse at any given moment, Jamie held out a hand and muttered "Keys," waiting for said objects to be slapped into his hands so he could go home and sleep off what felt like his own allotment of Mike's hangover, and dammit he couldn't even drink tonight because he was supposed to be the designated driver.

Mike seemed more interested in the book he had just pilfered from Jamie, scrunching up his handsome face in concentration as he worked to undo the latch holding it shut. With a quiet happy noise he succeeded, flipping the latch back and opening the book on the low roof of his car.

Sighing wearily and wondering how he came to be Mike's babysitter even though he was technically the younger one, even if only by one month (and here his parents had somehow used their ages to declare Mike  _his_ babysitter when they were preteens), he began shoving his hands in Mike's various pockets with a grimace, seeing as his friend seemed to have no plans of unearthing the keys himself.

"Whoa, at least buy me dinner first, sailor," Mike slurred in a mutter with only partial attention, eyes still squinting at the book as he flipped through its pages with a type of irreverence for its fragility that only he could achieve.

"I did. I paid for your lunch, your breakfast and all of your snacks too."

A pause. "Oh. Carry on, then."

That at least won a snort from Jamie, who had just finished his first circuit of Mike's pockets and had come up empty. After checking his own, as if the keys had somehow jumped to him without his notice (which, after living with Mike for three years, he could attest that they very well could have), he made a second trip through Mike's pockets.

"What the hell did you do with the keys?" he hissed under his breath when his second round also proved to be fruitless. He then abandoned Mike to the book so he could peer into the car's windows. "I don't see them in here…You better not have lost them in the carnival."

"Stop your worrying," Mike grumbled, prodding him sharply in the ribs. A few page flips later, he crowed in delight. "Ha!"

"What?" Jamie muttered, rubbing a hand wearily over his face. "You find the keys?"

Mike looked at him as if he were a particularly slow puppy: adorable, but atrociously dumb.

"Nooo," he said slowly, eyebrows rising as the word drew out. " _Better_."

"What, does the book have a section on how to teleport yourself home because your roommate is getting pissed with you?"

Mike rolled his eyes. "Stop fucking worrying so much, Jamie, you're being such a killjoy. What I  _found_ ," he said, placing particular emphasis on his achievement, "is a page in English!"

"That's what you're excited about? Are you kidding me?"

"Shut the hell up, you try reading the rest of this gibberish."

"I don't want to-"

"Hey, look at that! It can get my keys back!"

"…What?"

Once again unable to help himself, Jamie peered over Mike's shoulder, squinting at the thin, faded writing illuminated by the bright flashing lights of the carnival behind them and the parking lot's sole flickering lamppost.

"'To Return What Is Lost.' Dude, what the hell?"

"It's a  _spell_ , dumbass. We can use it to find the keys! Lost shit and all that, you know."

"Yeah, I know you're obviously more drunk than I thought if you're turning to voodoo, and you know spells and crap are sacrilege. I mean, Christ, Mike, are you shitting me?"

Mike leveled him an unimpressed look. "Y'know, I heard there was a whole thing about sacrilege and taking the Lord's name in vain and all too, but maybe I was just hearing things."

"Oh shut up, you're the moron who thinks a bit of chanting and a sprinkle of magic is going to save the day."

"Hey, you got a better idea? No? Then suck it up and read the damn book."

Jamie made what he was sure was a really great bitchface and shoved at his friend's arm. "What the hell? You read it if you want to, it's your idea."

"Yeah, but the crazy old lady said it was  _your_  book," Mike replied with an air of smug satisfaction, "and besides, between this light and my vision right now I could barely see the title." Ignoring Jamie's victory cry at his admission to actually being drunk, Mike simply jabbed the book into his side.

"Read," he commanded.

Rolling his eyes, Jamie muttered under his breath, "The shit I do for you," before leaning in to get a better look at the text.

"What the hell? The only English is the title! No way I can read this without phonetic spelling or something."

Mike prodded a silent, proud finger against the middle of the page, smirking all the while.

"…You kidding me? This thing is what, older than either of our family trees and it's got a damn phonetic pronunciation?"

A shrug. "Guess they figured they might get illiterates like you."

"It's not even Engl-"

" _Read_."

"Fine, fine I'm reading, geeze."

And he read.

And nothing happened.

"Christ, finally. You happy now? We read the magic spell, nothing happened. What do you want me to do, clap three times and spin in a circle? Wave my magic wand? Or can we finally just call a cab or something and get the spare keys from the apartment and come back tomorrow like normal people?"

Mike crossed his arms and stared at Jamie. "Obviously you just said it wrong. Scared off all the little Tinkerbells."

"Yeah, sure, okay. I'm calling a cab."

Jamie had just dug his phone from his pocket and began to search his saved numbers for the local cab company when something caught his eye.

"Hey Mikey, what's that?"

"Huh?" Mike looked up from his continued perusal of the book.

"There, right there, dumbass. That light in the cemetery. What is that, reflection from the carnival?"

Mike squinted for a moment before his face cleared into a grin of success. "Oh, now I see what you mean! I don't know. Looks kinda far in to be from the carnival lights."

"I know," Jamie muttered, taking a few steps forwards before remembering himself. "Looks strange though, doesn't it."

St. Finnegan's Church had crumbled long before either of the boys had been born, its broken foundation and stone remnants left to be speckled with wild grasses as the years went on. A high wrought iron fence had been placed around the small church and its graveyard in the 1920s as both a sign of respect for the dead and a way to keep out vandals who liked to frequent the abandoned church, playing among its ruins and often needing medical assistance because of it. The fence wasn't a complete deterrent, but regular police patrols kept the old parish free of too many intruders, despite the fact that the unused fields next to it, formerly the large unfilled section of its vast graveyard, had been turned into fairgrounds for whatever show, event or musician rolled into town.

That wasn't to say that the used section of its graveyard was small. In fact, when it was listed on the roster for National Historic Places, it had been noted for its extremely large size and well-preserved graves, many with legible dates leading from the last internment in 1901 to the early 18th century. The grasses were an eerie shade of green that appeared almost grey, like the life and color had been sucked out of the perpetually-gloomy lot, despite the fact that a groundskeeper regularly kept the place in fairly good shape.

It wasn't unheard of for kids to sneak into the cemetery when the groundskeeper was out, and when there were events going on right next door it was almost expected, but…where were the cops? There were always cops posted along the cemetery fence's perimeter when the fairgrounds were in use. Beer, young people and a cemetery next door was a fairly obvious equation and usually, the local law enforcement behaved accordingly.

But there was some sort of strange blue glow deep in the rows of slanting grey headstones, dim but bright enough to be seen even at this distance, and not a single officer was in sight.

"Strange," Jamie repeated to himself, voice almost a thoughtless mutter. His eyes never once left the glow.

"Wanna check it out?"

Mike's voice next to him was just the brash, almost-nasal shock he needed to pull himself from his trance-like state.

"What, and watch you skewer yourself on the fence? Not a chance. We're not kids anymore, Mike."

"You make it sound like we're old men, Jamie. Jesus. And I ain't gonna get myself hurt, I'm drunk but not that drunk. You wanna see what's there, I wanna see what's there, cops seem to have taken the night off, let's check it out!"

Jamie found himself torn, not over the legalities of trespassing – Lord knew he and Mike had spent enough of their time breaking into and out of St. Finnegan's in the past – but over his wish to get home and go to sleep and his curiosity over the light.

Mike, ever the best friend, chose for him when he set off at a pace that was rather brisk given the slight drunken weaving of his steps, book tucked firmly under his arm, towards the cemetery. By the time Jamie's brain caught up with the situation, Mike was already slipping the book through the fence's slats and looking for the best place to climb over.

He would tell himself later that he'd had no choice but to follow; he was only being a good friend, after all.

Mike would tell him it was fate, and maybe he was more than a little bit right, but Mike was drunk, so what the hell did he know anyway?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bluecamellia drew Madame Doyle!](https://armypeaches.tumblr.com/post/164877851406)


	2. Cearnach the Faery Everyone Loves to Hate, and Why His Name is Fitting in So Many Ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our heroes meet the a-hole faery who sets them off on their adventure and a deal is made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bear with me kids, next chapter (which is a twenty page monster) we get our good old BoB boys back. Here's some exposition on how they get to that point.

As Jamie pulled himself to the top of the fence, he couldn't help but think that he really had to stop enabling Mike. They couldn't keep doing shit like this; they weren't as limber as they were at twelve years old – well,  _he_  wasn't, but apparently Mike was as nimble as a damn lemur because he just threw himself over the side of the fence, hit the ground bonelessly and popped back up like a smiley, drunken Weeble. With a grimace he dropped to the ground more cautiously than Mike had, landing in a crouch before rising and following Mike who had already snatched up the book and set off further into the cemetery without bothering to even glance back and see if he was still alive.

Jogging, he caught up to him.

"Think maybe you should be a little more cautious?" he asked without prelude.

Mike snorted and rolled his eyes. "Your ma's rubbing off on you. What happened to the good old days when you would live a little? The Sisters used to call you a fucking hellion!"

"First of all, I know for a fact they never said that," Jamie whispered. Unlike Mike, he thought that perhaps whatever was the source of the light might not be so pleased with them making a loud entrance. "Second, you mean back when I used to follow you blindly?"

"Yeah! What the hell happened to that?"

"I grew a brain, Mikey," he muttered, grabbing his friend's shoulder to steer him around a low headstone that had sunk to ankle-height. "I grew a brain."

"Damn your brain," Mike replied, truly forlorn. Jamie chose not to respond, instead making shushing motions at his friend as the two crept closer to the dim blue glow.

They were deep into the cemetery now, surrounded by a sea of weathered, yet only slightly sunken gravestones with surprisingly legible inscriptions. The carnival was still visible to their left, faded by distance to a mass of bright lights and muffled noises, juxtaposed against the characteristic eerie stillness of the St. Finnegan's graveyard, an absence of sound that seemed to consume any noise it met. The unearthly quiet and inactivity made it popular with local paranormal fans, who were excited by the strange lack of wildlife activity; there were a disturbingly large amount of theories about why all the local crickets seemed to refuse to enter the cemetery.

Jamie had never understood the appeal. Yeah, it was a great place to party if you didn't want anyone hearing you, seeing as sound never seemed to carry far there, but it was also creepy as hell, and he'd always felt a little perturbed about dancing over the graves of Ernest and Martha Broadwell, Beloved Parents and Faithful Christians. Of course, that's what he had Mike for: to make him do all of those things he normally felt some compunctions about.

In retrospect, he probably could have avoided a lot of the detentions and groundings he'd received growing up if he hadn't hung out with Mike. But damn, would his life have been boring as hell.

From where they had spotted the glow from the parking lot, they should have been nearing its source by now, but Jamie couldn't see a discernible brightening in the blue light. Apparently Mike couldn't either, as he squinted and leaned forward, trying to make out the source from a distance and failing.

They were almost upon it now. Mike gestured to him to remain silent, eyes remarkably clear given his staggering attempts at stealth moments earlier, and held an arm in front of Jamie to keep his friend safely behind him.

Even when still fairly drunk, Mike had always viewed himself as the defender of the two, despite Jamie's protests that a month was not, in fact, such a huge age difference that he innately required protecting. Mike had always simply replied that it wasn't Jamie's age, it was the fact that he was a walking disaster area and bad luck magnet, despite his (and his mother's) best efforts. Then Jamie usually tried to prove him wrong and be the responsible one, failed, and things ended with Mike giving him smug looks for a week. Eventually, Jamie had just stopped trying to prove him wrong.

Finally the blue glow, still and unmoving, grew larger as they came upon it. It shone steadily on nearby headstones, soft and dim even at a close proximity. If it had shimmered and shifted a bit, it wouldn't have been unlike the peaceful glimmer of the tanks at the local aquarium. However, it didn't happen to be the calm light of a tank of gently floating jellies, but a sourceless shine on aging headstones in the middle of an abandoned cemetery in the dead of night, so Jamie didn't find it quite so mollifying.

"The fuck?" Mike muttered, jaw working in agitation. Jamie couldn't help but concur.

"I don't know man…" He trailed off, unsure of how to respond to the situation.

There was a light; they weren't crazy, they had both seen it all the way from the lot. And here it was, right in front of them. But it had never gotten brighter despite being visible much farther into the cemetery than should have been possible, and it also, very obviously and disturbingly, had no origin.

Decisively, Mike announced, "Creepy. As hell," and nodded once to affirm it before clapping his hands, swaying dangerously towards Jamie and loudly stating, "Well, that's that, Jamie-cakes, time to go home."

"Well that's a shame. You're going to hurt my feelings, leaving so soon."

It was decided later that, for the sake of both of their pride, neither would ever tell anyone how much, or how loudly, the other had screamed. In their defense, the sudden appearance of a smirking, sharp-featured man on a headstone to their right, at the center of the glow, was just the tiniest bit surprising.

"The fuck, man!" Mike shouted after he finished screaming, trying to calm his heavy breathing but never losing his wide-eyed look of shock.

Considering Jamie couldn't even bring himself to speak right now outside of curses and fricatives, he couldn't say he was doing much better himself.

"Such language," the man said, shaking his head with a scolding disappointment belied by the glimmer in shrewd green eyes set over high, pointed cheekbones.

Mike had never been a fan of being scolded by strangers. He liked it even less when said strangers tried to mock him.

"Who the fuck are you?" he growled. His tone was a combination of flat anger and passivity, but Jamie could see his deeper unhappiness in his tight posture and the way he kept silently working his jaw and gritting his molars.

The man canted his head to the side and gave Mike a sort of amused and slightly interested smile. "I'm not quite sure that's any of your concern," he said in an airy tone.

Abruptly, his gaze switched to Jamie. "It's plenty of yours, though."

Jamie was really, really tired of strangers telling him what he should be concerned about tonight. Mike could keep the concerns all to himself, he's the one who cared in the first place.

"Nope, I don't really care who you are. We're leaving now."

He grabbed onto Mike's arm, ready to steer his friend far away from the pointy, bony-looking man still lounging on a grave (Constance Markham would likely be scandalized to know that some loser in excessively tight jeans and a waistcoat with  _leather knee-high boots_  of all things was using her final resting place as a couch).

But when he tried to turn away to leave, he found himself unable to, muscles locked in place as if the message to move had left his brain and never quite reached them. His hand remained on Mike's arm; he could still feel the soft leather of his jacket under his fingertips, but his grip wasn't nearly as tight as the clenched fingers he could feel in his mind. He felt as if he was straining to pull his legs from a pit of mud, yet to his eyes they appeared as if he wasn't attempting to move at all. He tried in vain to leave, working to stave off his panic even as he felt his heart rate increase rapidly.

"The hell," he wheezed, eyes frantically shifting from Mike, who was watching him with concern, and the man, who was now sporting a wide, pleased grin.

As fast as the paralysis had set in it disappeared, causing Jamie, who had been straining so hard to move  _something_  other than his head and eyes, to collapse sideways against Mike, luckily just missing slamming his head against the grave of Lawrence Jankowski.

"What the hell did you do to me?" he shouted breathlessly at the man. Mike ducked down quickly into a crouch next to Jamie, helping him sit up and rubbing his back firmly while sending the man evil looks. Baffled, he remained silent and waited with Jamie for the man's answer.

The man in question shifted and crossed his legs, never losing his expression of being absolutely and positively pleased with himself.

"I couldn't have you running off on me! It would be rude! You did summon me, after all."

Jamie stared at him blankly before blinking at him, nonplussed.

"What." His tone of disbelief turned his question into a flat declaration.

He imagined that, if the man had less haughty dignity, he would be clasping his fingers in delight.

"You, you glorious idiot, you! You summoned me here!"

At the twin blank expressions he received, he took a deep, mocking breath and said pedantically, "The book? You did read a spell, you know."

"What, the car key thing?" Mike interjected. His eyebrows began to pinch together in his typical Mike-is-not-taking-your-bullshit expression.

The man rolled his eyes. "That is a ridiculous use of such a powerful spell, and that is not its intended purpose. Leave it to a pair of simpletons as yourselves to assume a spell to return what is lost is in regards to your  _car keys_." He said the words with such disdain that Jamie could almost see them dripping with it.

Mike was doing some eye rolling of his own. "Now I get it. You what, sat there listening in the parking lot and got the big idea you'd come screw with us? It was a joke, buddy, we don't actually believe in that shit."

"Oh, I fully well know that!" the man cried gleefully. "Whether or not you believe in it doesn't keep the spell from working!"

"I've had enough of this," Jamie grumbled, tired and frustrated with losing the keys and now having to deal with this freak, and still more than a little rattled by his recent inability to move.

"Uh-uh-uh," the man sing-songed, actually having the gall to waggle a finger at Jamie. "Do we want a repeat of last time?"

Jamie froze, this time of his own volition. On one hand, this weirdo was annoying as hell and he wanted to get as far away from him as possible. On the other, that feeling of being trapped in a body that refused to respond was one of the most horrifying he had ever felt in his life, and he now had a much greater sympathy and a new understanding for those who experienced it on a daily basis.

The man noticed his hesitation and was utterly excited by it. "I didn't think so. You called me here, James Carson, you may as well stick around for a chat."

The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop himself. "What the hell? How do you know my name? Who the hell are you?"

"Oh, Jimmy," he began with a happy sigh, obviously enjoying the way Jamie bristled at the diminutive, "There is so much I know about  _everything_. I know that you have absolutely no idea what's in store for you, and it is just  _adorable_. But I'll be kind and answer one of your questions. You may call me Cearnach."

"Oh, what the fuck!" Mike yelled, arms going up in the air as he rose to a stand. Bewildered and more than a little nervous now, Jamie slowly rose to stand next to him. "You're a damn Carnie? What the hell is it with you people? You set this up, huh, with that Doyle woman?"

The man now looked annoyed, Jamie noticed with no little satisfaction.

"Not  _Carnie_  you idiot," he seethed, " _Cearnach_."

"Sounds like Carnie to me," Mike replied glibly, raising one eyebrow in challenge. Jamie, relaxed immensely by the calming effects of Mike pissing somebody else off, nodded matter of factly, adding a cheerful, "Same!"

The man – Cearnach, apparently – scoffed at them. "Mortals, you're all a bunch of mindless mud-wallowing apes. But then, it is your tendencies towards a lack of intelligence that keeps me amused, so there is that. Regardless of your ability to say my name or recognize when you are invoking an ancient spell, you, Jimmy-boy, have a very interesting proposition in front of you."

"I read something out of a book from a Carnie woman," Jamie said, "It's a joke. None of that shit is real."

"Oh, no, Jimmy," Cearnach breathed, eyes vividly bright and sparkling dangerously in the dull blue light, "It's all real. You felt it, when our dear Madame Doyle, such a nice woman, chose to give the book to you, and you felt it when you read the spell. It was meant for you, Jimmy, you wouldn't have been able to read it if it hadn't been."

"Mike could read it," Jamie pointed out quickly. He didn't want to think about the sharp, acrid tang to the air when the elderly woman's eyes had landed on him, the same spark he could feel in the air now, only more concentrated. It was no longer the sensation of electricity in the air before a storm – now the storm was arriving. "It was in English, that's how he noticed it."

"But only the title! And he couldn't read the rest aloud, and you've never known Michael Lucarelli to be that impaired, no matter how much he's drunk. No, he gave it to you because it was intended for you. All of this has been intended for you. Madame Doyle was given that book over fifty years ago with the sole purpose of one day giving it to you."

"Why?" Jamie asked, suddenly feeling unbelievably, indescribably tired of everything that had occurred tonight.

"Because you've lost something, Jimmy, something ex _tremely_  important, and no, it isn't your idiot friend's keys. That spell is meant to recall a very particular thing, and it just so happens to be something that I'll give you a chance to regain tonight, if you're willing to pay the price."

"Okay, shut the hell up with the riddles, Carnie, and just tell us what it is." Jamie could always rely on Mike to break the tension in any situation.

Glaring at Mike for interrupting him, Cearnach set his gaze back on Jamie, grinned widely and said, "Your memories."

There was silence for a moment before Mike announced, "Yup, you're a nut," clapped Jamie on the back and made ready to leave. Jamie, however, wasn't quite so ready anymore.

"What memories? I don't have any gaps or blackouts, and there's a lot of shit from when I was a kid I'd rather not remember, so tell me, what could it possibly be that I'd want?"

Cearnach took his sarcasm with what Jamie was suspecting to be his nearly constant state of glee at others' frustration.

"Your past life, of course. That  _is_  the intent of the spell, Jimmy. If you could have read the Old Language like those of us with intelligence, you would have known that the spell was intended for that purpose and not something as mundane as a mortal's lost possessions. Oh, by the way."

He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and drew out a familiar set of keys, shining dully in the blue light. Jamie's eyes widened and he and Mike both made to move forward and snatch the keys, expressions matching in their indignation, but Cearnach was already moving his arm away, grinning maniacally.

"Not so fast, children, you can have them back once we're done with the real business."

"Business? What real business? You stole my goddamn keys, you freak!" Mike snarled, jaw and fists equally tight.

"Hush now, Michael, I'm trying to have a conversation," Cearnach demurred, raising a patronizing hand in his direction to match his tone. The other hand ghosted towards his waistcoat, removing the keys from sight once again.

"You, Jimmy, were chosen as the lucky winner of a chance to remember everything about your past life, and don't give me that, boy, you most definitely have one. Little Michael does too, but he wasn't chosen to play our game, no, that was just you. You get to be our special boy, Jimmy."

"…Yeah, that feels just as disturbing as it sounds," Jamie muttered with a nod.

Cearnach only smiled wider, and creepier.

"How the hell you even supposed to know this shit?" Mike crossed his arms once again, expression and posture relaying impatience.

And also once again, all they received was Cearnach's disturbing shit-eating grin.

"Didn't I mention it already? I apologize. I," – he paused, as if to relay great importance. Jamie blinked at him owlishly and Mike simply stared until he finally continued, if possible even more grandly – "Am a faery."

Silence reigned for a few seconds, the two men trying to determine what, if anything, should be their reaction to that announcement.

"Well," Mike began, eyeing Cearnach's artfully tossled coppery hair, thin, effeminate features and obnoxiously tight-fitting clothes, "You certainly are something."

Cearnach glared at him. "I'm a damn magical immortal, you imbecile, and have lived through and seen more than you, even with your two lives, can ever hope to imagine. I expect some damn respect."

"And I expect some damn proof," Mike returned evenly.

"The blue light? Does that not prove anything?"

"It's kinda dim," Mike replied easily, exaggeratedly taking in the area around them. He was right: the blue glow did little to light up the inky darkness of the cemetery, aside from making itself noticeable; if anything, the distant lights of the carnival, which would likely be shining well into the night, provided more actual, useful light than the dull aquarium glow.

Cearnach's face fixed in a snarl. "The orchestration of this entire night? Your keys magically disappearing, that old woman having received the book when she was a girl, your inability to read the book when the proper time came? How I know your names? Your friend's paralysis?"

Mike would have made another snide comment, but he checked himself at Jamie's uneasy shifting, for which Jamie was grateful; just the thought of those few seconds was already making him cringe and want to move around just to prove to himself that he still could.

The supposed faery smiled in satisfaction at his discomfort and the fact that Mike would no longer question his position as a mythical being, at least aloud.

"Good. Now if you would please, Michael, no more interruptions. Wouldn't want to have to cut out that tongue of yours!"

Actually, from his gleeful expression and cheeky tone, it sounded like there was nothing Cearnach would have liked to have done more than cut out Mike's tongue. That pleasantry cemented the decision to no longer question what may or may not have been Cearnach's delusions.

"Now Jimmy, you summoned me, you special boy, so you have a decision to make: would you like to regain your memories, an entire past life's worth, or head back to your dull mortal life and be left wondering just what, exactly, you missed out on?"

Jamie wasn't nearly as excited as the faery would have liked. "I don't really see why I should care. I mean, I don't even know what they are, and I like my life now, so why would I want to know?"

Cearnach's face pinched into what looked disturbingly like a pout, and he shifted to sit cross-legged on his headstone to glower at Jamie.

"Of course you should want to know! You used to be a different person! You lived an entire life!  _And_ ," he added with an abrupt change in tone, eyes coming alight, "It's not just you who this decision affects."

Jamie didn't think he liked the direction this was going in. He inquired warily, "How's that?"

"Well," Cearnach began, painfully slow in return just to agitate the boys, "If you  _do_  choose to remember, you'll likely run into some people from your past life, and your coming across them just  _might_  affect them enough that they don't, oh, I don't know, die horrible deaths within the next three years."

"What?" Jamie and Mike exclaimed in stereo with matching expressions of incredulity.

"How the hell do you know?" Jamie demanded.

Cearnach only gave him that damn secretive smile and tapped the side of his own head. "I know a lot of things about everything, Jimmy-boy. Knowing someone's fate is the least of my abilities. And I do know that some people from your former life, at least six, will die within the next three years, should you not remember your past."

Jamie was not sure how to take this. He frankly wanted nothing to do with Cearnach and whatever crazy train he had rode in on, and he would have lived happily without ever knowing anything about six people, or any people for that matter, who would die in the future. He didn't want to be the keeper of someone else's fate, and he most certainly didn't want the responsibility for their lives set on him like this.

But a part of him, a nobler part he didn't see very often, was sick at the idea that someone, anyone, even a total stranger, would die because of him, even if inadvertently, because he hadn't helped when he'd had the ability.

"You said there was a cost," he said slowly, speaking with quiet, precise and overly calm speech. Mike shot him a worried look, recognizing the nerves he was trying so desperately to hide. "Earlier. You said I could remember at a cost."

Cearnach's smile should have cracked his face with its size.

"Everything comes with a cost!" he sang. "Memories are no different. You summoned me, which gave you the chance to strike a deal. You can have the chance to remember everything, and just by virtue of you remembering you'll set in play events that will save at least six lives from their current paths towards death,  _but_  you have to do a little something for me."

"He's not sleeping with you," Mike interjected. Cearnach and Jamie shot him equally horrified glances. Unperturbed, he shrugged. "Just sounded like you were heading in that direction, thought I should nip it in the bud now."

Cearnach shuddered visibly, as if shaking off the very idea and the disgust he felt with it, which was a little offensive because Jamie thought he was a fairly attractive guy with a damn sparkling personality, thanks much. Besides, the mischievous look he shot Jamie next was positively salacious.

"I just want to play a little game with you, Jimmy. And not that kind of game!" he shouted, pointing at Mike whose mouth was already opening to comment.

Jamie made a face. "Still sounds plenty creepy."

"I want to play a game," Cearnach repeated loudly over him. "If I return your memories to you, you must play this game. You will have a year to complete it. If you complete your task within the year, you win. If you fail, you lose."

"Alright, I'll bite. Still think you're kinda crazy. What do I gotta do?"

Cearnach smiled a shark's grin. "I was hoping you'd ask. You're going to play a little game of tag. We fey call it Catch-Tag."

"That's a dumb name."

"Shut up Michael," Cearnach replied with gritted teeth before immediately flipping back into his pedantic, whimsical tone, smiling toothily at Jamie.

"You'll be given a list of people who were important in your past life, not only to you, but to your group as a whole. This means that you may not even know them all."

"How the hell am I supposed to play the damn game if I don't know the peop-"

"I am talking! ...Ahem, yes, as I was saying, there will be a list of people from your past life, all of whom have been reincarnated, just as you have been. Like you, none of them remember their pasts. If you win the game, their memories, too, will be restored to them."

"How do I play?"

Cearnach gave him a death glare and spoke through gritted teeth, saying, "I am getting there, Jimmy, if you would please let me finish."

"Hey, I was just asking-"

"As I was saying!" he shouted loudly over the redhead. "You will have exactly one year to locate each person on this list. Like you, they will be living a new life under a new name, but the names on your list will be the ones you would have known them as in the past. You must tag this person, by which I mean I expect you to physically touch them and say 'tag,' because nonverbal tag is not tag at all and is just  _so_  boring. When you tag them, a mark will appear on them labeling them as tagged."

Jamie wasn't sure how he felt about any of this. A glance to the side showed that Mike was annoyed, per usual. He himself felt anxious, both about the fresh responsibility he could just feel being heaved on him and the situation in general. And how the hell was he supposed to track down what was sounding to be a large number of people if they didn't even have the same names as he knew? What the hell good would a list do him then?

He asked this, and Cearnach watched him fondly, giving him the look Mike gave him when he thought he was being a dumb puppy.

"That's the fun of the  _game_ , silly! It wouldn't be challenging if you could just look them all up on the internet! You'll have to use a bit of ingenuity, especially because they can't know what you're doing."

"Wait, what?"

"Oh, Jimmy, if you and your monkey with an underbite over there would stop interrupting me, I could finish explaining the rules to you. Nobody on your list may know what you're up to. You have to tag them, and then leave before they see the mark that appears, because they're going to be awfully confused, and if they catch you and try to question you on what just happened, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. If you tell  _anybody_  about the past lives or the game, anybody at all, the game is forfeit and you lose."

Mike, pissed about the underbite comment and angry at being ignored, interjected once again. "Lemme get this straight: you want Jamie to run around across the country-"

"Globe, in some cases," Cearnach cut in happily.

"-Run around chasing after people he may not have ever even known – and that's saying you're not full of shit already – and play a game of fucking tag with them, except it's  _secret_  tag and leaves a goddamn brand or something, and if he lets them know what's going on, like, say, why the hell he's touching them, he's out?"

"Oh, he's more than out," Cearnach cooed. He was as smugly delighted as was likely physically possible. "Haven't I mentioned it yet? If Jamie loses, either by failing to tag everyone within a year or by forfeiting through exposure, he dies."

"What?" Jamie choked breathlessly while at the same time Mike shouted, "What the fuck?"

He felt like he had just been kicked in the gut. Before, the responsibility for strangers' lives had been an unwelcome pressure, but one he was willing to give in to knowing that he could help others. But now, weighing the worth of strangers' lives versus his own, to remember a life that, if it really existed at all, may not have been all that great to begin with?

"Why the hell would he ever agree to that shit?" Mike stepped closer to Cearnach, arms crossed over his chest and expression deadly. "He doesn't even know these people!"

"Innocent lives are at stake," the faery sang. "And, perhaps, a few years from now when they go, I'll feel philanthropic enough to give ickle Jimmy a few of his memories back. Just a handful, mind you, to be kind. And maybe, just maybe, he'll see some news reports about the untimely deaths of a few people who look awfully similar to some people in his handful of memories. All by coincidence, of course."

When Jamie was seven, he had walked out onto the pond at the local park, on a dare from Mike, who insisted that the ice would be thick enough to hold him. It wasn't, and the sharp chill of the water, the sensation of it suddenly consuming him and creeping into his mouth, his throat and lungs with jagged, icy tendrils until Mike had been able to fish him out, and even then choking on the painful, sheer  _cold_ of it all, was one that he had luckily never felt again and still had nightmares about sometimes.

Right now, he felt as if that ice had just given way underneath him again.

Knowing his voice was shaking and hating himself for that sign of weakness, he said, "You can't put that on me. You can't tell me I have a choice and then threaten me with shit like that. Why the hell do I even have to do this? Who are you to try to make me do this?!"

Cearnach smiled his cryptic little smile, and Jamie had never wanted to slug someone in his life as much as he wanted to remove that smarmy little smirk from Cearnach's face right now.

"Oh, Jimmy. It had to be you. It's always been you. Because we wanted it to be! We're fey, Jimmy. This is how we get our jollies: watching little mud-monkeys like you crawl around and play games for our amusement. We've always done it, and we'll be doing it long after you and your orthodonitcally-challenged friend there are more dust than dearest Constance here." He patted the stone beneath him.

"We're fey. We make the rules, and don't have to answer to anybody about them. You're just a pawn in our game, Jimmy. This is all for the entertainment value – well, for us. It's all life or death for you, Jimmy, which really sucks. But time's running out, Jimmy-boy. You have to choose: are you going to let your old friends die in obscurity and live with that guilt for the rest of your safe, boring little mortal life? Or are you going to take a risk and save them by playing one, eensie little children's game with me?

"The choice is yours, Jimmy. The ball's in your court."


	3. A Most Enjoyable Walk Down Memory Lane, or Why Faeries are Sadistic Dicks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys get their memories back, the rules are set and Cearnach is the world's biggest dick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been sitting on this bastard for six months and I don't know why, so I'm posting it on a whim. Frankly I tend to forget that I haven't posted it yet. Fourth chapter is giving me a really rough time, so I figured posting this might spark some inspiration. Also, it's 2am and I'm bored and going through old files instead of sleeping, but my hockey team just lost (again) and I'm not even surprised and I only have one class later anyway and it's all the teacher reading aloud from the book. This is how I'll justify things to myself when I hate me for being up this late in a few hours.
> 
> Anyways, things take a turn for the darker end of urban fantasy. It's not usually seen in this fandom but oh well, I like it. Don't expect an update soon, by the way, I'm still stuck as hell on the next part. Sorry.
> 
> Also PLEASE NOTE: This chapter contains some possibly upsetting content, please see the endnote for a spoilery warning.

In the end, it took Jamie all of five seconds to finish his deliberation. Of course, that didn't mean he was going to make things easy for the rat bastard whose sanity still remained to be seen. Either he was nuts and Jamie would just deck him, take his keys and go home, or he would turn out to be telling the truth and Jamie would regain memories from some sort of past life, and get to finally go on that road trip he and Mike had always wanted to do but never been able to afford after high school.

But however truthful Cearnach was being, he was still waiting with baited breath, leaning forward precariously on his headstone, to hear Jamie's answer. Which is why Jamie was doing everything he could to extend his "thinking period."

By now he'd played every version of eeny-meeny-miny-moe he knew of, loudly weighed out his pros and cons for both choices, asked for advice from Mike (who, catching onto the game after spying the particularly strange twisted expression of frustration and excitement on Cearnach's face, had happily played along), and was now flipping a coin, best out of 127.

Cearnach didn't make it to 34.

"That is enough! Decision, mortal, now!  _Make it_."

"English, nutjob, speak.  _Learn it_."

Cearnach was not nearly as amused by Mike as Mike was by himself.

"This is a serious matter, you ape. If you've forgotten, your precious friend's life hangs in the balance. So shut your exceptionally large trap!"

Jamie's head canted to the side. "You know, if I took that really incorrectly, it almost sounds like you care about me."

Cearnach raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "No, I really don't."

"Figured as much. So! I've made my decision."

It was at this point that Jamie decided he probably shouldn't have been surprised by Cearnach's mood swings anymore, even if he flipped from furious to delighted with such rapidity that it was liable to give everyone else whiplash just from watching him.

"And what have you decided? Are you going to abandon your friends to their deaths, or take a chance with your own life?"

"Depends, are you going to speak normally or keep repeating yourself like a game show host after they come back from a break? Gonna tell me who gets voted off next?"

Mike laughed and high-fived Jamie, only slightly off on his angle and thankfully avoiding smacking his friend in the face. "Score!"

"I hate you both," Cearnach announced matter-of-factly.

"Same," the pair chorused back at him. As an afterthought Jamie added, "Oh yeah, and I'll try your thing or whatever. The memory shit."

Cearnach sputtered, horrified. "The- the  _memory shit_? We are-  _I_ am offering you a  _gift_ , a chance for once in your plebeian life to actually do something  _meaningful_ -"

"I'll have you know that my high school guidance counselor told me that everybody's meaningful, no matter what they do. Besides, you said I was doing this for your shits and giggles, we all heard it, now cut the crap and slap some memories on me. Mike here has a bedtime and we're already way past it."

Mike nodded. "I get real cranky when I don't get my eight hours."

" _Heathens_ ," Cearnach hissed, even as he moved towards Jamie. Making a face, Jamie stepped back. The supposed-faery approached again, and Jamie, giving him an even odder look, moved backwards until he felt the backs of his knees bump against a headstone behind him.

He was really considering making the sign of the cross at Cearnach as the man hovered well within his personal space bubble, an arm partially raised. "First, calling yourself a faery or some shit like that, I think that's a bit more heretical than not respecting your…whatever that is. Second, you wanna back up a bit, buddy? It's called personal space."

"And we already established that you can't sleep with him!" Mike crowed from the side.

"Will the both of you  _shut up_?" Cearnach growled, one hand strangling the air in the general direction of Mike's throat (and for the first time in his life Jamie was actually glad the Force wasn't real) while the other continued reaching for Jamie. "I'm doing as you asked!"

Not waiting to allow either of them to react, he pressed two fingers to Jamie's left temple. Jamie began to reach for his wrist to push it away, mouth already open to rebuke him, when the edges of his vision began to fuzz, colors bleeding together and dammit, he was passing out like some clichéd soap opera character, wasn't he?

As if to compound the prosaism, that was the moment when everything went black.

Later, he would have probably rather wished that he'd passed out for real.

~~~

It was fitting that the first thing Private Edward James Heffron remembered about his life was not his family, or the start of the war or joining the army or even going to jump school and meeting his buddy Julian. No, the first thing Babe Heffron remembered was Wild Bill Guarnere's smug mug as he asked him if he was from Philly, and the following sense of acceptance and novelty at meeting someone for the first time in a foreign country who had been so geographically close to him his entire life.

 _Then_  came the veritable shitstorm of fast-paced childhood-through-boot camp memories, complete in migraine-inducing blurred montage.

Things slowed down when they hit Babe's joining up with Easy Company, which was to say, they changed from the rapid pace of a highway car chase to the nauseating dizziness of a broken-merry-go-round-induced color vomit complete with a soundtrack of familiar voices saying words he had never heard before.

" _That's it, a 'Dear Babe' letter!"_

" _Well, you… you don't look like an Edward."_

" _Hinkel!"_

" _You know he told me he was a goddamn virgin?"_

And oh God, that one's about Julian, the kid from his, no  _Babe's_  foxhole, the kid Babe met in training, he was from Philly too, and he'd promised him he'd get his stuff back to his ma, oh God, he was bleeding out, red blood on sickeningly sterile-white snow, and he just kept  _moving_  and the Krauts wouldn't stop firing on their position and he couldn't leave his body to them, he couldn't, his  _ma_  and  _Julian_  and-

Jamie – no, Babe –  _Jamie_  felt a sick sense of relief when the moving shift of scenes did not remain long in that snow-covered wood from Hell, even if his mind was still shivering with the bone-deep cold of an unending winter and his friend, choking on his own blood. After all, the war hadn't stopped when John Julian had died, and apparently neither would the onslaught of Jamie's – Babe's – old memories.

Then Muck and Penkala were gone, there one minute and just  _gone_  with one goddamn direct hit of a mortar and  _shit_  holy  _shit_  so were Joe Toye and Bill, oh God, Bill, both of them with matching leg wounds and  _shit_ , Bill. And Buck was gone now too, gone because he couldn't stand to see his friends blown to bits all around him and why couldn't Jamie leave too? Why did he have to watch his friends disappear, one by one while other people got to quit early? Jamie hadn't signed up for this shit, he didn't want to see what happened next, he just wanted it to goddamn  _end_  already-

But they weren't Jamie's friends, they were Babe's. And Babe knew why he was fighting, and why he was glad Buck could get some rest while the rest of them stuck it out in that godforsaken forest with the most inept CO the army could dredge up, and why losing his friends meant he had to try even harder to beat those goddamn Kraut bastards who'd taken them away. Jamie may not have understood, but Babe did, he understood it perfectly. Even when Jamie wanted to look away, Babe made him see the memories, his life, through to the end.

And things did pick up. More soldiers fell, both due to the Krauts' efforts and Dike's failure as a leader, but then Speirs arrived and while he was scary as shit, Jamie –  _Babe_  respected him, knew he could lead them to the end of this war.

Webster returned, like anybody really gave a damn at the moment, and there was that idiot dead-of-night patrol, because it was  _always_ 2nd Platoon, and look, there was Jackson getting himself blown up with his own grenade.

The memory of the general sense of relief at hearing Winters, straight-laced by-the-book Jesus-incarnate Captain Richard Winters informing them that he would be filing a report on that second-patrol-that-wasn't, came at the same time as Jackson's screams while a low voice tried to soothe him and calm his attention, as he was treated by-

And there's Landsberg, all those prisoners, those  _people_ , emaciated and dead-eyed like walking corpses, like at any moment they might just collapse and join those bodies piled everywhere around them, not a place you could turn without seeing corpses spilling out of huts, out of train cars, goddamn bodies  _everywhere_  with the stench of death and burning flesh, how could they do this, how could they-

Berchtesgaden, and they're taking over Hitler's own goddamn home after the bastard does them all the favor of shooting himself, and they're taking the Eagle's Nest, drinking up a storm and then the Germans surrender, a damn  _general_  marches his whole Panzer Corps right up to Jamie –  _Babe_  himself and tells him that he's surrendering, and of course he won't surrender to Private Babe Heffron from Philly, so instead he gets the illustrious freshly-minted Second Lieutenant C. Carwood Lipton of Huntington, West Virginia, and then it's all one big party of hurry-up-and-wait for Easy Company.

That is, until Shifty gets to go home (and gets himself all mangled up in a car accident, goddammit) and Janovec gets himself killed too, and then some dumbass from I Company gets himself drunk and shoots Grant in the damn head and Speirs almost kills him, comes  _this close_  to shooting him ( _he should have killed him_ ) but he doesn't, he lets the bastard live and that proves he's a better man than Jamie – Babe –  _either_  of them will ever be. But dammit, the war's over, why are they still dying?

But then it really  _is_  over. They're playing baseball and Buck's back and for once they can all forget this strange limbo of who's-staying-who's-going-when-are-they-shipping-us-to-the-Pacific that they've been trapped in for so long when Winters approaches and tells them that the Japanese have surrendered, the Second World War is finished and done with and everyone can go home now. Jamie remembers being happy, so very happy over something he had only ever experienced through textbooks and big Hollywood movies, an end he had taken as inevitable in his junior year American history course, an end that Babe had felt would never come – or at least, he would never live to see. He was sad, too, brokenhearted to leave all of his friends, his  _brothers_  behind, but it's okay, there will be reunions, they've made it out alive and they've lost so many, so many people, so many brothers, but they'll live on for them, they'll go home and make those lives everyone would have wanted them to have, and it will be perfect.

He turned and smiled at the man next to him, said, "It's really over. I can't believe it," and he got a smile, and he loved those smiles, he loved getting those rare smiles from-

And Jamie went home,  _Babe_  went home, and he got a job, got married, had a family, made a life for himself, he was happy. He saw Bill and Joe Toye, balancing on their crutches and showing off to the ladies like missing a leg was the new fad, both still grinning, both still  _living_  despite all the shit the Krauts threw at them, everything that had been taken from them. He went to reunions and caught up with all of his old friends. He lived out a happy, normal life, and that was all he could have wanted.

Except.

Except there was something missing. There was something there, niggling at the back of Babe's mind, some piece of this mad puzzle that hadn't quite clicked into place yet. He'd seen his life, start to finish, elementary school to old age, but there was something that just kept evading his mind.

He racked his brains, watching vague images of his past float up, slower now that they'd all finished rushing him, reliving the familiar moments at a sedate pace. But there were still blank spots, blurred patches where things cut short, where something should have been, where-

" _You called me Babe."_

Oh.

" _I did? When?"_

There it was.

" _Just now."_

How could he have forgotten this?

" _Babe… I guess I did."_

How could he have ever,  _ever_  forgotten a single thing about this man?

"' _Babe.'"_

His life had been happy, and it had been a full one. But there was one thing that had been missing then, and it was still missing now.

" _Heffron? Watch the goddamned line."_

But now, he had a second chance. He could get it back.

It was fitting that while Bill Guarnere was the first person Babe Heffron remembered, Eugene Roe was the last.

~~~

"Jamie! Jamie! Christ, wake up kid, your ma's gonna kill me if you die on me. Hell,  _I'm_  gonna kill  _you_  if you die on me!"

Babe cracked open one eye, head pounding thoroughly and in time with the blunt voice above him, and was thankful to find that for once, he wasn't met with a blinding, migraine-inducing light. In fact, it was so dark it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dull blue glow. When they did, his gaze fell upon a familiar face, its expression twisted in a typically look of gruff concern and mock annoyance. Rolling his eyes he sat up, balanced himself on one hand and rubbed his knuckles against his temple.

"Shut the hell up, Bill, I'm fine."

"Bill? Who the fuck is Bill?"

Oh.

 _Shit_.

Both of Babe's eyes shot open – no, no he's Jamie, his name was  _James Carson_ , damn it! But it wasn't. He was James Carson, he was still Jamie, but he was also Babe Heffron, maybe more so at the moment with the war fresh in his mind and that damned carnival so many years away.

But even if he was Babe Heffron, and Babe Heffron recognized Bill Guarnere, it didn't look like the recognition was reciprocated. At least, not as he'd have liked.

Accusatory eyes sought out the faery, returned to his headstone and smug as he'd ever been, eyes glinting sharply in the dull light.

"What the hell, man? What is this shit?"

Cearnach grinned wider, revealing a pointed, toothy grin. "This is what you agreed to, James Carson. Or rather, hello, Edward Heffron, this is what you, as ickle Jimmy Carson, agreed to."

Babe glowered, gritting his teeth against his growing headache and pushing himself to a stand, brushing off what Bill would deny were his fluttering, concerned hands – no, not Bill, he was still Mike, he didn't remember.

Shit, his best friend in two lifetimes and he didn't remember.

"What about him?" he demanded of the faery, thumbing a hand at Mike, who watched him with the look of growing anger he always got when he was frustrated with being left out of the loop.

"What  _about_  him, Eddie dearest?"

"Okay, first of all, that's creepy as hell, never say that again or I will break your weird little shark teeth. Second, why the hell am I the one remembering and he's just all…not!"

Cearnach laughed, and it made Babe want to garrote him all the more. "That wasn't part of the deal, darling! This was about  _your_  memories, and maybe, if you're a good little boy who gets his work done in a timely manner, the rest of your list's memories. None of this is about any one person getting an extra special treatment just because they're your  _friend_."

"And speaking of your list," he continued on, speaking loudly to block out Babe's infuriated protests, "I feel it's about time I impart that little trinket of wisdom onto you. I would love to stay and extend our visit, but it seems I'm just  _so_  busy of later, sweetheart, it looks like I won't be able to stick around and chat much longer. Now, I'm only going to say the names once, and because I'm a courteous gentleman, I'll even list them in alphabetical order, by last name to boot, just like you little army ants!"

"What the fuck," Mike said flatly, utterly nonplussed.

"Shush now, Michael, grownups are talking and there's always that matter of cutting out your tongue."

"You leave him alone you sparkly little bastard, or I'll-"

"Yes, yes, you'll shoot me or stab me or maybe even  _hurt my feelings_ , I'm sure it's all very threatening and positively adorable, Edward, but we don't have time for that anymore. Now listen carefully, because while I am a saint, willing to say these names so slowly and kindly for you, I am on a schedule, and am only saying these once. Keep in mind that this is by no means every person in your little posse, so don't think you can just go guessing names, and if you miss any, you'll never win our little bargain. Understand?"

Without waiting for a response he clapped long, bony fingers together, smiled brightly and remarked, "Great!" before loudly launching into his list.

"James Alley!"

Cursing, Babe did his best to listen carefully to the names while scrabbling in his pockets for a pencil, a pen, something. Catching on quickly, Mike split his attention between searching himself for a writing utensil and trying to memorize the names, mouthing each one as he heard them in an attempt to commit them to memory – and Babe was thankful for small mercies in that he at least would probably recognized most of these names if they were all from Easy Company, which he was fairly sure by now they would have to be, what with himself, Bill and now Moe all accounted for in this future-reincarnation-whatever-the-hell-it-was.

"Albert Blithe!"

Okay, so he wouldn't recognize all of the names. That was okay, he could do research, it'd be great, he just had to keep track of the outliers and all of that shit, which would be great, if he could find a goddamn pen!

"Burton Christenson!"

"Could you give us a goddamn minute?" Mike shouted at the faery, clenching his jaw as he kept searching for a way to record the names. "His name ain't even Edward!"

Cearnach only swung his feet like a schoolboy over the side of the tombstone and merrily called out, "Roy Cobb!"

Moe, Christenson, Cobb and some guy named Albert Blithe, he had this. A new idea appeared to Babe, and he immediately tried putting it into action. The earth under him was soft, damp with the recent rain and humidity they'd been experiencing; anything he carved in it would stick, at least long enough for him to get a pen or something and write it down.

When his own hand proved not quite stiff enough to make a satisfactory, legible dent in the ground, Babe's gaze scanned the immediate area around him, looking for a stick or a twig, anything that looked useable. Mike, understanding his game without an exchange of words, lunged a row over and snatched up a stick snapped off from a nearby maple tree, rushing to place it in Babe's hands. With a nod of silent thanks Babe grabbed up the stick and began to carve names into the ground.

"Lynn Compton!"

Or at least he tried to, but as soon as he drew a line in the soft dirt, it would just fade from his view. Squinting at the ground, he ripped up a few handfuls of grass to make the dirt more visible and started writing again, eyes widening in shock and anger as he saw the half-formed letters fade before his eyes, not filling in with dirt but just  _disappearing_ , as if the earth hadn't been touched.

A single glance at Cearnach's glee proved that this was no accident, nor would arguing or asking for a pause in the list get him anywhere. The faery gave him a patronizing look and exaggeratedly glanced down at his feet before shouting, "William Dukeman!"

Resting against poor Constance Markham's headstone was a short, gleaming dagger with a plain black hilt, and really, a freaking dagger? What the hell next, a sword so he could slay the dragon? No, wait, he forgot, the dragon-slaying swords were only given to the  _Marines_.

"Antonio Garcia!"

Rolling his eyes but knowing he apparently had no choice, Babe snatched up the knife and returned to his attempts at writing down the list.

"Walter Gordon!"

But even those letters evaporated from sight only moments after they were drawn.

"Okay, what the hell?" Turning enraged eyes on Cearnach, Babe held up the knife. "What do you expect me to do with this? Obviously you want me to use it, because you're as subtle as a damn freight train, but if you haven't realized, it isn't really working! So unless you expect me to cut out  _your_  tongue with it, and trust me, I really, really would love to, I don't know what-"

"Oh, Edward," Cearnach interrupted. His ubiquitous smile had an empty quality to it that, despite exposure to the rest of his myriad of obnoxious and foreboding expressions, made Babe's skin crawl. "Haven't you ever heard of bleeding for what you're passionate about?"

Babe could feel his mouth gaping in shock, only vaguely hearing Mike's shout of "What the hell is that supposed to mean?!" This was, to put it as gently as Mike would, completely fucked up. Because he was fairly sure he knew what he was supposed to be doing, or at least what Cearnach expected him to do and had likely made the only method that  _would_  work, but it was also evil as hell.

So, really, he probably shouldn't have been so surprised, given Cearnach's previous behavior and palpable hatred for well, pretty much everything except for other people's pain. Schadenfreude, ain't that what the Krauts called it?

"Charles Grant! Oh come now, Edward, I do hope you have an excellent memory if you aren't planning on writing things down."

"The hell you expect him to do?" Mike interjected, advancing on Cearnach only to find himself frozen as Babe – no, that had been Jamie – had been earlier, entire body trapped by an unseen force, absolutely refusing to respond. Babe's stomach turned at the growing panic in his friend's eyes, even as his face remained stony, jaw locked tight in anger. He couldn't even speak; it was actually  _worse_  than what Jamie had gone through.

Babe hoped there was some extra-special hellish place for things like Cearnach. Some place that played Cher's greatest hits all day long. That would be nice.

Cearnach rolled his eyes as the duo watched each other in panic and concern. "William Guarnere!" he yelled. His voice faded into a delighted cackle as the blood drained from Babe's face. Mike, failing to understand the newfound issue, appeared even more distressed.

"You can't-" Babe choked on his words, swallowing thickly. "How can you- that's not fair! He can't be one of the people on the list, he already heard about every damn thing you told me! How the hell am I supposed to avoid letting them know what I'm doing when  _you already told them?!_ "

The faery's head fell back in laughter, coppery hair shimmering around him like a demented halo. "I didn't tell him who he was, Edward – that was all you!"

"What- oh come on, like he wouldn't have figured it out? He's not an idiot!"

"Huh, that wasn't my impression." He shot a too-sweet smile at the still-immobilized Mike before fluttering his fingers daintily at Babe. "Now run along Edward, be a good boy and make your list. Maybe if you play by my rules I'll make an exception for our dear Michael."

"Yeah? If I don't?"

The shark's smile returned. With a stage whisper Cearnach said, "Then you lose!" before saying loudly, "Use their full names now, dear. John Halls!"

Cearnach was still watching him avidly, but ignored any of Babe's further attempts at slowing him down or getting more information. Babe stared at the man – no, he had to call him a faery, it sounded dumb as hell but he couldn't think that this was a person – and then at the knife in his hands, flexing his fingers against the dagger's sturdy hilt. It was a good quality, better than the jump knives from the war; it would probably make a cleaner and safer cut. He could just grit his teeth and think of something else and get the list done with the way the sick bastard wanted it.

Or he could be abso-freaking-lutely insane because what the hell was he doing, considering carving himself up like a damn Thanksgiving turkey for some strange-ass son of a bitch who appeared out of nowhere and thought he could just restructure all of Babe's life?

Wait. No. Jamie's life. Cearnach had pretty much ruined  _Jamie's_  life, but he gave Babe a second chance. No, that still wasn't right – Jamie  _was_  Babe, just a Babe without the memories of  _being_  Babe. But Jamie had been happy, untouched by the war. Jamie would never consider cutting himself up like this to make the freak happy.

But then, Jamie didn't know these people. To him, they were just an abstract list, some strangers who would get hurt if he didn't get off his ginger ass and take some risks. They weren't his friends; he couldn't put faces to the names like Babe could, smiles and stories and emotions. He couldn't tell them apart by the way they walked, their silhouette on a horizon. The part of him that thought with Jamie's memories and mentality was horrified to even still be holding the knife because it had never had to know what it was like to fight a war, to lose your friends and have to keep fighting to save those that remained.

Jamie also had never known what it was like to be thrown in a group of strangers and come out thinking of them as family. That was why Babe was considering doing this – no, why he  _was_  doing this, he thought as he threw off his jacket and shoved back his left sleeve as far as it would go. He knew what it was like to bleed for your friends, your brothers. He would do it again.

Blocking out Cearnach's smile, ignoring Mike's wild yet frozen stare and muttering "I don't even know that damn Halls guy" under his breath just to remind Cearnach that he hadn't broken Babe Heffron yet and wouldn't ever do so, Babe held the knife in hand, wiped it against his jeans to get it as clean as it would ever be and gently, delicately brought the fine point down onto the top of his wrist, pressing lightly.

"Donald Hoobler!"

The first drop of blood welled up, bright and red and perfectly round, and Babe could honestly say he hadn't felt a thing. The first cut, the first letter, went just as smoothly, Babe's only real problem being that he felt like a kid in an after-school special and his own blood kept getting in his way when he tried to check his progress.

By the end of the "James" in Alley's name, his wrist had started up a light sting, like a scrape after falling off a bike, and Mike looked about ready to pass out from his forcefully restrained exclamations of anger. By the time Babe had finished Alley's name, blood was flowing bright and steady from his arm, neat little trickles tracing paths down his wrist, and his teeth were firmly gritted against the pain. It turned out that, like when he had tried to draw in the ground, anything like a papercut in depth just wasn't good enough for Cearnach and the skin would knit back together before his eyes. Sure, it didn't take a lot of pressure to make a "satisfactory" cut but that didn't mean it didn't smart a bit and make Babe feel like a nut to boot.

Shaking his head, he ignored the burn in his arm that was still more annoying than painful and tried to quickly but neatly work his way through the growing list with small but precise letters. It was Alley, that Blithe guy, Christenson, Cobb – and really, he had to immortalize Cobb on his own skin? – Compton, Dukeman, Garcia, Gordon, Grant,  _Guarnere_ , that Halls guy, and Hoobler.

"Eugene Jackson!"

Okay, and apparently Jackson too.

As he continued the blood only ran thicker, waylaying his progress further every time he had to swipe his hand across the cuts, drawing a hiss through his teeth with each moment of contact. Damn, but why had he picked his arm? It was not at all conducive to what was apparently a very long list of Easy Company men – well, he was guessing they were all Easy, but he still didn't know a few – but like hell was he going to go play masochist on some other poor part of his body and mutilate himself even further. This shit better not scar too badly, or he was going to be pissed.

John Janovec, Henry Jones (really? Come on,  _really_?), John Julian.

That last name gave him a moment of happy pause as he finally finished that Halls guy's name. He would help Julian this time, protect him. This was his second chance, and he sure as hell wasn't losing his friend a second time.

In the back of his mind, along with his idle observations on Cearnach's glee and Mike's growing silent distress and other things he was steadfastly ignoring at the moment, Babe noted that that statement could apply to a lot of people on this list.

Joseph Liebgott, Clifford Lipton, George Luz.

The throbbing burn had turned into actual pain now. No longer one giant pulsing papercut, Babe found himself making small, wounded sounds with each new line, much to his own frustration and embarrassment and Cearnach's distant joy and applause.

"Oh, good show, Edward! You really are quite a sport, darling. Lovely execution."

Donald Malarkey, John Martin, Alton More, Warren Muck.

Twenty-two names and given Babe's knowledge of the alphabet and Easy's members, they were nowhere near done yet.

Distantly he thanked whatever God had allowed this – because he couldn't believe that his would ever condone things like this being done for some sick children's book character's amusement – that at the very least, Cearnach wasn't making him use middle names. His arm looked enough like a horror movie prop as it was.

Lewis Nixon, Patrick O'Keefe, Alex Penkala, Frank Perconte.

It seemed for every few names that made him happy, every few people who he smiled at the thought of seeing again, there was at least one that really gave him pause because, come on, were all these people seriously necessary? He didn't think anyone except for possibly Webster would ever really be glad to see that green Westpointer Jones again (and oh, the letter "w" had never felt so far away) and O'Keefe was an alright guy, under the annoying naïveté, but did he really matter to Easy Company so much that he was on the list instead of one of Babe's fellow replacements who had lasted longer, like Hashey, or hell, his buddy from 2nd Platoon, McClung, or even Easy's old CO Meehan that everybody had told him about?

(Realizing that Dike wasn't on the list, he abruptly decided he should be thankful for small mercies and simply put his efforts towards praying that Easy's first infamous CO didn't show up further down the list, because if he was hesitant to put Jones or Cobb on his arm, like hell did he want a memorial to Sobel.)

Darrell Powers, Denver Randleman,  _Eugene Roe_.

Babe did his best to ignore how some unacknowledged tension in his stomach eased when he heard that name bellowed by the smug bastard o'er yonder.

Wayne Sisk, Ronald Speirs, Ralph Spina.

Well look at that, another Philly boy back in action. He grinned to himself even as tears formed, unbidden, in the corners of his eyes. Cearnach's confused comments about his smile only made it grow as he ignored the faery, because right now nothing felt better than pissing that freak off.

Besides, it was a little calming to be able to say at least one of Easy's COs was making a comeback. He didn't even want to imagine what would happen if Winters wasn't on the list.

Who would be their Nixon Wrangler then?

Floyd Talbert, Edward Tipper, Joseph Toye.

Hearing Toye's name made Babe breathe another sigh of relief amidst his deep, shaking breaths. Bill, when he got him back – because he would make damn sure Cearnach held up his end of this fucked up bargain and fixed Bill – wouldn't be very pleased if Toye didn't come back with him, after all that work he did to drag him to safety back in the war.

Christ, "back in the war." If anything felt recent, felt  _real_ , it was the war. It was the rest of this – Jamie's life, the carnival, the last hour or so – that felt unreal.

They were in the home stretch now.

David Webster, Harry Welsh, Richard Winters ( _thank Christ_ ), Robert Wynn.

So focused was Babe on holding his arm and hand still as he cut the tiny lines into the thin skin just at the crease of his elbow that it took him a while to notice the abrupt silence around him. When he had carved out the final letter of Popeye's name, laid the knife on the ground, swiped the blood off his arm again and took a moment to breathe past the fresh wave of exceptionally distracting pain (he almost wished someone was shooting at him, because then he'd at least have the adrenaline rush to numb it), he glanced up at Cearnach, who had fallen still now upon his grave marker, peering keenly at Babe's bloodied arm.

"Well now," he murmured to himself, head canting birdlike to the side as he examined Babe, "You actually did it. I have to say, I'm impressed. Disappointed, too – you didn't scream at all and weren't nearly as expressive as I'd have liked."

"Paratroopers," Babe said with a sharp smile of his own, "They don't make 'em like us anymore."

"No," the other replied contemplatively, "I don't suppose they do. But, a deal is a deal."

With a flick of the faery's hand Mike collapsed to the ground with a loud moan of pain. Immediately Babe was at his side, helping his friend into a sitting position.

"The hell, Jamie!" Mike groaned, both in pain and at the sight of his friend's arm. "What the fuck were you thinking?"

Babe smiled tightly and rubbed at his friend's shoulder briefly before trying to help him to his feet while getting a minimal amount of blood onto him, and shit, it really was everywhere. "Didn't have much of a choice."

"Of course you had a choice! We could have remembered it together, you take a part, I take a part – we would have had this! You didn't have to, shit, go all emo on me or something!" Mike waved an arm at Babe as if to encompass the damage.

The redhead frowned, examining his arm for a moment. "Forty names."

"What?"

"There are forty names here. I even know most of these, but I'd have never been able to keep track of them all and avoid mixing them up with the people who  _aren't_  on the list. You'd have had an even worse time of it because you don't know any of them."

"What, so it worked? You really remembered everything then? Those people?"

Babe squinted at his friend. "C'mon, Mike, don't go reaffirming the asshole's preconceptions about your intelligence."

"Aw, shut the hell up,  _Edward_. Christ, really, Edward? You kidding me?"

"I could say the same about you, William."

"Huh?"

"About that!" Cearnach interrupted. He'd once again started to get that annoyed toddler look he affected when he felt he was being ignored. "You did bring to my attention,  _Edward_ , that our dearest Michael here is not only on your list, but already aware of the situation. Of course, you ruined things for yourself by letting him know, multiple times now I must point out, about his past identity and thus involvement with our little game. Now, because I'm a benevolent sort-" Here he ignored twin snorts of disbelief. "- and because you played along so nicely, if not disappointingly blandly, I'll help you out of our little dilemma. Catch!"

He tossed something small at Babe that almost slipped right through his bloodied hands. When he had a firm grip on it, he held it up in the blue light to see a surprisingly heavy gold pocket watch, now smeared red. Frowning, he rubbed a thumb across the cover, trying to make out the inscription before rearing back in surprise.

"Screaming eagle? Carnie, you make this special just for little old me?"

"I thought you'd like it," Cearnach purred with a hum. "Open it!"

He sounded way too kindly and excited for either Babe or Mike's tastes. Holding back a moue of disgust at the faery's behavior, Babe pressed the button atop the watch and the small door sprung open.

Inside was a clock with thin golden hands, underneath which there was the vaguely silvery outline of a spade that took up the entirety of the face; Babe wouldn't let himself show his pride at the sight of it there, because while he loved the 506th PIR, he wasn't going to give Cearnach that satisfaction.

The time on the face said 11:59 at night, which could have been the time for all Babe knew, though he'd have thought it was a bit later. What threw Babe off was the second set of numbers on the clock face and the fourth, longer hand, pointing at the twelve – or rather, at the 365 printed in a neat script above it. And the tiny golden secondhand was ticking merrily away – counterclockwise. When it ticked backwards to face the twelve again, the minute hand ticked back to 11:58.

He held up the watch, ignoring the sensation of his own blood dripping down his arm with the movement from the sluggishly bleeding cuts, and gave Cearnach a quizzical look. "What the hell?"

"It's a countdown. You have a year to play the game, and because I'm a lovely person, I've provided you with a way to see how much time you have left. At the moment, it's at three hundred and sixty-four days – because sorry, I don't count that extra quarter of a day – twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes, minus a few seconds. When that day hand has made its full countdown, the game is up. But wait, there's more!"

"We don't want to hear it," Mike grumbled from where he was pulling on Babe's arm, trying to examine it and wipe at the blood with God-he-hoped-those-were-unused tissues from his pocket.

"Oh, but you really, really do. This pertains to you, Michael darling. Remember Edward, when you tag someone from your list properly – and I do mean that you must say 'tag,' it's so dreadfully boring if you don't – a mark will appear on them. Use Michael here as a guinea pig; go ahead, I don't mind."

Mike, however, did mind, in an extremely verbal manner. "You're branding me?" he exclaimed, hand unconsciously tightening on Babe's arm and drawing a hiss and a wince before he remembered himself and relaxed it. "Listen, you think I'm some dude on your list, that Bill guy, right? Well, even if I am I don't want to play lab rat to see what happens!"

"Oh hush now, Michael, it's painless."

"Somehow I don't believe you. Oh yeah, it's 'cause you made my friend carve himself up for fun!"

Cearnach smiled dreamily. "Yes, that was quite fun, wasn't it? And wouldn't you know, Michael, that's the same dagger I'd like to cut your tongue out with."

"Shut the hell up," Babe grumbled before eyeing Mike. "Pick a spot."

"What?"

"If I gotta mark you up or something, I may as well let you pick where you want it. Be happy, it doesn't sound like anybody else gets that choice."

Mike was still obviously displeased and was going to continue verbalizing it, until he spotted the serious, imploring shade to his friend's eyes. With a sigh, he yanked at the collar of his shirt until his collarbone and upper chest were exposed. "Least if it's here I can hide it, I guess."

Nodding silently, Babe swallowed and eyed his friend before reaching out with his less-bloodied hand and touching his fingertips lightly to Mike's chest. Working to suppress a blush at how dumb he felt, he muttered barely loud enough for his own ears to hear, "Tag."

Par for the course with Cearnach, nothing happened. Babe withdrew his hand and both he and Mike eyed the latter's chest. "Well that was pointless," Mike announced with finality.

"Not so," replied Cearnach easily. "Check the watch."

Finding it pointless to argue, Babe glanced back at the watch in his bloodied hand. He was about to remark that nothing had happened when the tiniest sliver of red filled in at the bottom of the spade.

"Holy shit!" Mike yelped.

Babe was about to comment blandly that of everything they had seen and heard tonight, that wasn't exactly one of the most shocking, when he realized that Mike was looking not at the spade, but at Babe's arm that he had gone back to cleaning. Some of the cuts had stopped bleeding but were still an angry, upraised red, while others still leaked blood. One, however, had ceased bleeding altogether: "William Guarnere" was no longer a lightly scabbed cut, but a smooth, black name.

"Shit," Babe cursed under his breath. "I have to get goddamn tattoos of all these people? That's the thanks I get for helping them out?"

"I have a flair for the dramatic," Cearnach said with a smile.

Mike rolled his eyes and scoffed. "No crap, Sherlock."

"Michael, close your mouth and examine your chest."

"Say what?"

Exasperatedly the faery growled, "Just do it."

Pulling back his shirt once again, Mike revealed a small, bright red spade identical in size and shape to the one in Babe's pocket watch.

"Shit," Babe whispered again.

"Do stop saying that, Edward, you're being more obnoxiously repetitive than usual."

"Bite me."

"I should be so unfortunate," Cearnach muttered. "Now if you gentleman will excuse me, I have places to be, things to do-"

"Lives to ruin," Mike interjected.

"Possibly, possibly. So, without further ado-"

"Wait!" Babe interjected.

He received a bored look for his troubles. "Edward, I haven't even begun to leave yet."

"Exactly, I'm preemptive. You said you were going to fix things so I wouldn't forfeit just by having Bill, um, Mike here. You were going to go back on our deal and leave without doing that. Aren't you people not supposed to be able to break deals?"

Cearnach laughed, loudly and coldly. "Oh, Edward, that was adorable, thank you for that. You probably think we can't lie either. You think some inane laws can restrain us? We do what we like, when we wish it. Of course, I  _did_  make a deal and as a show of good faith, because I am so sportsmanly like that, I'll help 'fix things' for Michael here."

He waved his fingers at Mike as if to beckon him closer. Mike was splitting his attention between Babe's arm, examining the mark on his chest and listening to Cearnach. When he noticed the gesture, he looked as if he was being waved at by a giant squid.

"Nope."

Cearnach frowned. "What?"

"Sorry buddy, not happening. I don't do anything just because somebody twinkled their fingers at me. No, wait, I won't do things  _especially_  if somebody just twinkled their fingers at me."

"Apes," the faery hissed before approaching Mike and, before he could protest, touching his fingers to Mike's temple just as he had done to Jamie. Babe, having never viewed this happening to another person, was just a little surprised when Mike's eyes rolled back into his head and he crumpled to the ground. Babe just barely caught him before he cracked his head on a marble slab.

"Oops," Cearnach said, already sounding utterly bored.

Babe grimaced and ignored him to instead place his focus on Mike, a heavy weight on his throbbing arm who was twitching and muttering inaudibly, eyes moving rapidly behind closed lids. "How long is he gonna be out?"

Cearnach examined his nails, because of  _course_  he would do that. "I don't know. You did that for about two or three minutes, he could take that long or longer…or maybe shorter…it really all just depends…"

"You're so helpful."

"I can still cut out tongues, Edward. I'd recommend you shut your mud-wallowing trap."

Before Babe could retort, Mike's eyes shot open. Only it wasn't Mike staring back at him. And it most certainly wasn't Mike who took one glance at him, gave him a shit-eating grin and said, "Christ, Babe, you look like you saw a fuckin' ghost!"

A helpless laugh escaping him, Babe couldn't help but grab his friend up in a tight embrace. "You're the one who swooned like a dame, you idiot," he mumbled into his friend's shoulder.

"Swooned? I passed out! You, you my friend were the dame, collapsing all dramatic-"

"Like you didn't?"

"Hey, I'm sure I at least collapsed with a touch of masculinity intact. You were just all over the place, mumbling and twitching."

"That's exactly what you did!"

"I did it better."

"This is touching!" Cearnach near-screamed to draw their attention back to him. "But I really must go. Edward… _William_ …I shall see you in a year. Now don't think you can cheat, because you've agreed to my rules, and while I may not be compelled to complete deals, you are bound to our agreements by pain of death, and I  _will_  know if you cheat. I will always have an eye on you, Edward. Now, I really must be off. Prepare yourself, gentlemen, you have quite the journey ahead of you. Catch-Tag is always a most entertaining but grueling sport.

"And now…Let the game begin!"

There was silence as the pair, now standing, watched the faery remain with his arms raised above his head as if posing for the cover of the Lion King.

Bill coughed conspicuously.

"Clock says the game already started."

More silence, followed by an exclaimed, "The game has begun!"

With what sounded like the whoosh of a non-existent cape and a flutter of absent wings, Cearnach and his truly pitiful blue glow disappeared. Atop the headstone of Constance Markham, Bill's – or maybe it was Mike's – keys merrily reflected the lights of the carnival's Ferris wheel.

Silence again. Then, Bill took a look at Babe, then at the distant lights of the carnival, then around the empty cemetery, St. Finnegan's a barely discernible pile of rubble under the moonlight, and then back at Babe before announcing definitively, "Well, shit."

Babe couldn't have said it better himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter contains detailed descriptions of forced self-harm, which I'm warning for because it's uncharacteristic of the rest of the story and may come as an unwelcome surprise given the general tone of the fic.
> 
> Here's the full list of guys to be found:
> 
> James Alley, Albert Blithe, Burton Christenson, Roy Cobb, Lynn Compton, William Dukeman, Antonio Garcia, Walter Gordon, Charles Grant, William Guarnere, John Halls, Donald Hoobler, Eugene Jackson, John Janovec, Henry Jones, John Julian, Joseph Liebgott, Clifford Lipton, George Luz, Donald Malarkey, John Martin, Alton More, Warren Muck, Lewis Nixon, Patrick O’Keefe, Alex Penkala, Frank Perconte, Darrel Powers, Denver Randleman, Eugene Roe, Wayne Sisk, Ronald Speirs, Ralph Spina, Floyd Talbert, Edward Tipper, Joseph Toye, David Webster, Harry Welsh, Richard Winters, Robert Wynn


	4. Hangoversies, or the Worst Morning-After Ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the light of day, the shit has to hit the fan eventually, but sometimes Bill can have good ideas - when he isn't puking all over the world, that is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, it's been like, nearly two years since I updated this, and even longer since I actually wrote part of it....hahahahaha...ha..haaaa.... I do have a lot of reasons for that, like hockey devouring my life for the past two and a half years (like totally hit me up if you want to talk hockey bro) and my hard-drive eating itself, meaning I lost everything I had written for the next chapter (and everything I'd written in the past five years...) and got really despondent over it. But an amazing friend of mine had saved my notes for me, and I never stopped thinking about this story, so, uh, surprise, it's back! It's a little angsty, because I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing happier fics again (I, uh, am known for writing a lot of exceptionally angst-ridden hockey fics...) and because I don't think I'd be doing this fic right if there wasn't a bit of existential angst and self-doubt.
> 
> ANYWAYS. This fic is back! It has real notes this time! I actually know what the next chapter is going to be! I have a MAP! It's probably going to take the next lifetime to finish this monster, but hey, it's a reincarnation fic so like that all works out, right...? (just laugh, please) And I just want to take a moment to thank every person who commented on this fic during my exceptionally long hiatus, because it was knowing that people were still reading and enjoying this fic that really made me want to come back to it and remember how much fun I had writing it. You guys are amazing.

The ride home was silent. Well, that wasn't fully correct: it was _mostly_ silent, except for right when Babe started the car (because there was still no way he was letting Mike – Bill – whoever-the-fuck-he-was drive) and the radio jumped to life, something by Pitbull that apparently required repeatedly shouting about being Mr. Worldwide. Babe didn't know which song it was; he was pretty sure he maybe just had one song and kept releasing it over and over with a new title.

He felt a little bit like that himself right about now.

Regardless, he slammed the power button on the radio immediately. This was the kind of car ride that necessitated silence, and for once it wasn't because one of the parties had passed out drunk in the passenger seat.

Though, by the time Babe (or Jamie?) pulled in at their apartment building, Bill _was_ passed out in the passenger seat, and it was a welcome distraction from the thoughts stewing around in Babe's (probably Jamie's) head like spaghetti left to boil too long until it became pale and fragile and a little gross.

Jamie felt a little gross. It was probably fitting that his brain was too.

Pouring Mike (and it had been Mike) into bed after getting drunk all night was such a normal part of routine life that Jamie (because Babe didn't do this) found himself relishing in it, from getting to bitch about hauling Mike's dead weight around to bitching about having to help him get undressed to bitching about every single wrong Mike had done him that had led Jamie to think he was a good best friend and someone that Jamie should feel obligated to put to bed when he was drunk.

Mostly, Jamie did a lot of bitching. He didn't regret that, because Mike usually deserved it.

But he couldn't decide if he regretted tonight. Not yet, at least. He figured he probably would, in the future. It sounded like things were going to get super-shitty, and he wasn't looking forward to dealing with it.

But regret...? Well, maybe Jamie regretted everything, this mess he'd seemingly gotten himself into. But Babe didn't: he was proud, mostly, or maybe not quite proud, but resolved, firm in his decision. Maybe a little nervous, but not enough to put him off his newfound mission.

Jamie kind of wanted to tell Babe to go fuck himself, but the implications of that were too confusing and uncomfortable for him to pursue that train of thought much further.

The idea of sleep was both delicious and extremely elusive; as tired as he was (and the only comparable experience he could imagine was being crouched up and freezing in a hole in the ground in a Belgian forest, and he didn't want to claim that as his own just yet), he knew that he was just going to stare at the ceiling for hours until the sun came through the tiny window of his cubicle-sized bedroom.

For once, he envied Mike his ability to be a sleepy drunk, and he couldn't quite recall if Bill had been the same way, once upon a time. Maybe he would have been if not for the adrenaline that made a permanent home in their veins, back then.

The bathroom was still just as cramped as Jamie had left it this morning, messy and cluttered and outdated, tiles a little dingy, faucet that never completely stopped dripping, and with a mirror smudged by months of shower-fog smiley faces.

That mirror looked the same, but the Jamie he saw in the mirror did not. It was more than just the names carved impossibly small on his arm ( _how had he made them all fit?_ ), dried blood still flaking off with every movement and one standing out stark and black against his pale, freckled skin. It was the look on his face, in his eyes, far too worn for a man of twenty-one, practically a boy with his whole life in front of him. Or at least, it was too worn for someone who had never seen war, had never had the weight of the world placed on his shoulders.

Jamie supposed that he was that person now, or Babe was, at any rate. And he was Babe: he could feel it in the way he held himself, the way he took in his surroundings. Something about him had changed and become distinctly more Babe-like.

And he didn't now how he felt about that. It felt normal, to be like this, because he was Babe, and this was how Babe was. But Jamie had never developed these instincts, this worldview. He didn't catalogue every room he entered looking for exits, for signs of life. He didn't expect that an enemy could be around any corner.

He also didn't carve up his arm with strangers' names for the amusement of a capricious madman.

But Babe did all of those things. This was _normal_ , except for where it wasn't. Babe was himself, and Jamie feared that he was getting swept away in it. Washed out, maybe. Disposed of. Babe was back, and Babe was identical to Jamie, he was the same goddamn person, except for when he wasn't, because Jamie hadn't been in war, and he hadn't been married or had a family, and he had never been in love. And Babe hadn't met Bill in Philadelphia, hadn't lived without war, hadn't gotten a job at a bar after high school and been able to spend his days dicking around because he didn't have any responsibilities but to himself, his ma and his best friend.

Babe and Jamie were identical and yet wholly, irrevocably different. They had had different formative experiences, different cultural influences. And it would be so easy to just ignore all of that and be Babe, who felt strong, who felt like he knew what he was doing. It would be so easy to be Babe and just let Jamie go, and that was the real reason Jamie couldn't go to sleep, why he was scrubbing furiously at the blood on his arm, the water in the sink turning red as it swept down the drain, washed away just like Jamie could be if he closed his eyes for too long.

If Jamie went to sleep, would he ever wake up again? Or would he just be Babe forever? Maybe that would be better. Would he even notice the change?

It felt impossibly large, right now, the disorientation and dissociation jarring and more than a little terrifying. Could he lose himself to _himself_?

Mike would tell him to stop his goddamn philosophical whining. Bill would probably say the same thing, perhaps throwing in a comment about how that was Webster's shtick. Mike hadn't appeared to be struggling with his new (old) persona at all. Babe envied him it, but wouldn't begrudge him; at least one of them should be able to have their head on straight. (Though admittedly, of the two of them, that person traditionally was not Mike.)

Mike (or Bill) would be right, though: it was way too late for this kind of existential philosophizing, and worrying about it all wasn't going to change anything: it was an inevitability, like a Philadelphian's hatred of Pittsburgh and Mike getting shitfaced drunk at a family-friendly carnival (like Babe and Bill being best friends), that eventually Jamie would have to go to sleep, and he might not wake up feeling very much like Jamie.

He would have to bite that bullet sometime.

May as well do it now, so he would at least have the benefit of a few hours of sleep and not looking as disgusting and exhausted as Mike in the morning.

It was the small victories that Jamie celebrated.

He dried off his arm, wrapped it in loose gauze, took one last long look at whoever he was in the mirror, and turned off the lights.

~~~

He woke to the dulcet sounds of somebody choking up their spleen, and for one short moment everything felt right with the world.

"Jamie!" a hoarse voice echoed through the small apartment, "Holy shit, Jamie, I'm dying!"

Everything was as it should be. It was amazing how calming routine could feel.

"Jamie?" More hesitant this time, followed by a hacking cough. "Jamie? ...Can you make pancakes?"

He smiled to himself and called from the comfortable quiet of his bed, "Dying men don't need pancakes! Especially not when they just threw up everything they ate in the last decade!"

"It's my last request!"

"Well it's a shitty choice, then!"

Whatever Mike was about to reply with (probably something of the four-letter variety with accusations about the questionable nature of Jamie's conception – and would he ever love for his mother to be here to hear this), it was swallowed – or rather, regurgitated – by the sounds of the second half of Mike's annual tradition, the part where he spent the majority of the morning crumpled on the floor of the bathroom, revisiting his meals and moaning to any poor soul near enough to hear him (i.e., Jamie) about what a cruel mistress alcohol could be. All while trying to beg favors and meals and promises that Jamie would pick up more beer on his way back from the grocery store.

Maybe this is what it felt like to have a pet alcoholic. He should ask Major Winters about it.

Oh.

Yeah.

That was a thing that had happened.

Okay.

On the upside, he was still himself – that is to say, he was Jamie, but also Babe and both at the same time and everything in between, which would be to say, all fucked up. But it was the same way he'd felt last night, so at least his new-old self hadn't like, subsumed and absorbed his Jamie-ness while he slept. He was still himself, whoever that was.

On the downside, _that was a thing that had happened_ and holy shit, oh God, what had he been thinking, he'd just signed and dated his own death certificate and given himself a year – no, now _less_ than a year to live, because there was a pocket watch on his nightstand with a screaming eagle embossed into the cover, and he didn't have to open it to know that it was still counting down, ticking away the seconds and minutes and hours and days of his life and a year from now he would be _dead_ , because there was no way he was going to somehow divine the locations of forty men who could be anywhere in the entire goddamn world solely based on knowledge of what they were like under different names seventy years ago.

It was a fool's errand, a foregone conclusion, and he'd bought into the whole thing because Babe was a bleeding heart and loyal to a fault, and Jamie would have been the same, had he lived Babe's life.

So he knew that he'd try, because God, he _had_ to try, there was no option but to try because if he didn't try, he would just be giving up and accepting his inevitable death without even a whimper, and that wasn't how Babe or Jamie operated. He was going to die, he had no doubt about it, but the least he could do was give this thing a shot, and maybe the handful of people he might be able to track down in a year would be better off for being found, right?

"Jamie? Jamie, I need you to come look at this and tell me if this looks like blood to you!"

"It's just your brains, dumbass, because I'm sure you don't have any of those left!"

Right.

He should probably start teaching Mike how to look after himself when he was hungover, he thought as he stretched carefully and sat up on the edge of his bed. It would be for the best, for him to learn now, so he could do it when Jamie was gone.

"Jamie? Jamie I'm serious, did I drink like fruit punch last night because I don't think it's supposed to look like this!"

But that would have to wait for another day, because today Jamie was going to examine his best friend's vomit and remind him that leprosy had nothing to do with hangovers or throwing up and no, Mike probably didn't have it.

There really was something soothing about routine.

~~~

Jamie was throwing together some bastardized form of brunch ("We don't eat brunch, Jamie-cakes, that's a chick thing. We eat hangoversies, and we eat it whenever we damn well feel like it. Like when it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch") when Mike emerged for what was apparently the final time from the bathroom, freshly showered and looking more like a drowned rat with orthodontic issues than the spring daisy he was probably shooting for, and slumped onto one of the barstools at the island, pressing his head against the countertop.

"Are those pancakes?" he asked the scratched Formica. The Formica didn't answer.

"Because I'm the best friend in the entire world," Jamie said from the stove, "Yes. But if you upchuck these too, I'm never cooking for you again."

"I love you," Mike told the Formica. It was probably flattered.

Watching Mike eat was pretty disgusting, considering that he'd spent hours this morning slumped against a toilet losing every lunch he'd ever eaten. But then again, watching Mike eat on a good day was usually gross too. Chocolate syrup was not supposed to meet its maple cousin, especially not on top of the same pancakes (chocolate chip, because they were Mike's favorites, and because blueberries were more expensive).

"So what are we gonna do about this whole game thing?" Mike asked, mouth half-full. Jamie nearly choked on his own food.

He hadn't been sure Mike remembered any of that. Then again, recalling your past life in vivid technicolor detail _was_ a fairly memorable experience, especially when it came with someone repeatedly threatening to separate your tongue from the rest of your person.

"I, uh, hadn't really thought about it yet."

Mike paused in his chewing to raise an eyebrow in Jamie's direction, too astute for his own good despite the occasionally sloppy exterior, and Jamie was suddenly struck with how much that was like Bill – and how much it was like Mike. God, but he really was exactly the same.

"Okay, and the truth? 'Cause I know that's absolute bullshit. You probably stayed up half the night just thinking about it."

Guilty as charged, but it wasn't like Jamie was just going to _admit_ it.

"How the hell would you know, you were unconscious as soon as we got in the door!"

Mike tapped at his temple, thankfully with the hand that wasn't currently holding a syrup-coated fork. "It's 'cause I know you, Jamie-boy. I know how you are. And I know that you're probably freaking the fuck out about it all and being all dramatic, because that's what you always do, and I'm gonna tell you right now that you shouldn't even bother 'cause we're gonna figure this thing out together, alright?"

Sometimes it was irritating, to have somebody know you so well that they could call you on all of your shit. And sometimes, it was such a relief to have them be able to voice everything you couldn't find the words to say yourself.

"It's not really that easy." But God, the way Mike said it, it almost felt like it could be. "Mikey, did you think about this thing? Forty names – _forty_! How the hell are we gonna find forty people in a year when literally all we know about them is their old names?"

"We know what they look like, and how they acted. That's a start."

"But I don't even _know_ some of these guys!"

Mike gave him a calculating look, at ridiculous odds with the chipmunk cheeks his mouthful of pancakes gave him.

"Let me see it." He gestured to Jamie's arm.

Knowing that resistance was futile, Jamie offered his arm up for inspection. Mike peeled back the gauze with careful, hopefully-not-syrup-covered hands.

The skin of Jamie's arm was still red, and he felt the raw sting when Mike's fingers grasped the uncovered area, but it wasn't puffy and inflamed the way it probably should be – and by some miracle it didn't appear infected, not a spot of oozing pus in sight – and Jamie had an uncomfortable feeling that that had something to do with the supernatural nature of the whole thing.

The names themselves were still present, and it was an uncomfortable experience to have the events of last night thrown so starkly into his face the next morning, to see in blatant detail, carved into his own skin, the nature of the deal he had made. He should have realized from the start that a bargain for his life would be sealed with blood.

Bill's name stood out from the rest, a smooth, dark tattoo etched in Jamie's impossibly tiny chicken-scratch knife-writing (and he shuddered to recognize that there had to be something preternatural about how he was able to fit so many tiny names when carving up his own arm with a fucking _knife_ ). Mike passed his fingers over it glancingly, almost as if without thinking, and Jamie didn't have to flinch because it was the one part of his arm that wasn't sore.

Mike angled his arm closer, shifting so he was pressed against Jamie's side and could read the list right-side up.

"Okay, let me see...I think I know most of these guys. Janovec, I don't know him...Jones...O'Keefe...I think that's it, I know the rest of 'em. Not sure why Speirs is there, but hey, what the hell."

"I know those guys," Jamie said numbly, in a way that really said that Babe knew them, and Jamie only felt as if he did. "And Speirs, uh – he became our new CO in Foy, at the end of the campaign in Bastogne. You learned about it after the war, remember? Everyone was at the reunions?"

Mike was quiet for a moment, scrutinizing Jamie's arm without really seeing it, before saying quietly, "Yeah, I guess I did. Don't know why I didn't think of it."

The thing was, Jamie _did_ know why, because it was the same reason why he felt like he was sitting in a dream and would wake up at any moment back in the Ardennes, why his wife and his children – Babe's family – were more recent chronologically but felt hazy and distant, something he objectively _knew_ but couldn't really recall. Pulling up memories from after the war was like swimming through molasses, murky and slow, drowsy to the point where he, too, nearly forgot they were there.

"It's like we just woke up from the war," he said, even though in his mind it felt like the opposite and they had only just gone to sleep in a foxhole somewhere. "And everything else is there, but not really _there_ you know?"

It didn't make sense, but Mike nodded anyway because to him it would.

"I guess the war is what's...important," he said slowly, and Jamie didn't have to see the twist of discomfort on his face to know that the words were like ash in his mouth. Calling their families "unimportant," felt wrong, felt like betrayal. Those were people they'd loved, people who must miss them a lot. But they weren't here for those people; they were here for their company, for Easy. This was about them. And that was probably why they were most prevalent in their memories.

It still wasn't an entirely pleasant notion. But Jamie still nodded and mumbled, "Yeah, I get what you mean."

They were both quiet for a moment, staring pensively at Jamie's arm. Jamie cleared his throat.

"So, uh, these guys I don't know, you'll be able to tell me about them?"

"Refresh my memory, kid, which ones?"

"Uh...Blithe...Halls...Tipper..."

He looked up, and Mike's face was grim, twisted up with something conflicted and sad.

"You knew them?"

It felt accurate to use the past-tense.

"You did too, afterwards. Two of them, at least, they showed up at reunions. Blithe, he's the one we all _thought_ died in the war. Turned out the little shit survived getting shot in the neck and actually signed up again for Korea, got more stars on his jump wings than any of us. And Tip, you remember him, right?"

The memories were slow to come, like trying to crawl through thick wool to an ephemeral idea, but Babe got a quick flash of a tall man, a teacher with scars on his face and a smiling young wife.

"Yeah...yeah. And, uh...this other guy, Halls?"

Mike frowned now and looked away, swallowing uncomfortably in a way that Jamie knew signified bad news.

"He, uh...he died, in the war. Back in Brécourt Manor, just after D-Day. First guy Winters lost in combat, I think." He still wasn't looking at Jamie, but held his wrist tightly as he glowered at the countertop.

"Dumbass wasn't even in Easy, you know, he was Able Company. He found Winters during Normandy and just clung on to Easy after that, wanted to help out. He was too stupidly brave for his own good. Fucking Cowboy." He shook his head, his voice derisive, but it was obvious that he didn't really feel his scorn.

"So he..."

"I don't know why he's on the list," Mike interjected. "But I kind of know why he's on the list, you know?"

He looked at Jamie now, eyes beseeching, asking him not to make Mike spell it out further, and Jamie was struck with how Babe had never known any of this. In all of his years with Bill, during and after the war, he had never heard about John Halls, a fucking Cowboy who wasn't even a member of Easy. Considering how many people had lost their lives during Normandy, people who _had_ been a part of Easy (a whole goddamn plane, Babe knew), one guy who wasn't even in their company probably wasn't worth a footnote in their story.

But Jamie could tell from Mike's reaction – Bill's reaction, really – that John Halls must have been more to Easy than just a man from another company who died early on: in a way, he wasn't just the first man that Winters lost in combat, but the first for Easy as well. At least, he was the first that they lost after the jump, the first who died in front of them, helping them. He wasn't Easy, but he had been a part of their history.

And Jamie would bet his ass that he was young, too. There was something about the young guys – Janovec, _Julian,_ Dukeman, Hoobs, Skip and Penk, Jackson, and now Halls – the guys who were young because they never got a chance to get old – that made his heart twist painfully, and he felt so, so glad that they got to have this second chance at life. They were the ones who really deserved it.

"Yeah," he said, "I know."

Mike nodded and cleared his throat loudly.

"So, yeah. We know who everyone is."

"Okay." Jamie wasn't going to make him draw out the uncomfortable moment any further. "But even if we know who they _were_ and what they looked like, how will that help us now? Unless they're all like stupidly famous, there's no way we can find them just by knowing what they look like – and it's not even like either of us could draw pictures of them to show people, because you're not even good at drawing stick-figures-"

"They don't _need_ their limbs to all be the same length!"

"-so we're going to have to try to track down some of the old scrapbooks if we want any chance of trying to show their pictures around. But even that isn't going to help much seeing as they could be _anywhere_ on the planet. God, even knowing their _new_ names would make this difficult, but without them, it's just impossible."

"Now don't say that," Mike scolded, squeezing his wrist. "If it was impossible, Carnie wouldn't have made that deal."

"Are you kidding? If it was impossible that's _exactly_ why he would have made that deal! He tried to leave without giving you your memories back just so I'd lose by default because you already knew everything!"

"Yeah, but like...I don't know, you just gotta have faith, okay? I have a feeling about this – shut up, I have feelings sometimes – and I just think that this whole thing wouldn't exist unless there was some way you could win, right? Like, the fun for him is watching you fail something that's _possible_ because it proves he's better than you – if he's watching you lose at something you literally could never win anyway, then how is that fun? It's handing himself the victory before the game even starts. Nah, there's gotta be something in there that makes it a challenge, so he can really say that he beat you. There's gotta be a way to win, even if we just can't see it."

"Because we're wallowing mud-monkeys who wouldn't see the answer if it beat them in the face," Jamie murmured with a small smile.

Mike clapped him on the back and smiled warmly.

"Exactly! That's the spirit, Jamie-cakes. We're idiots, but there's a _chance_ somewhere out there for us to win this, so we just gotta figure it out."

When he said it like that, it sounded possible.

Late that afternoon, after hours of brainstorming ideas, it didn't sound so possible anymore.

"Where are we even supposed to _start_?" Jamie groaned, flopping back against the couch with a dramatic huff, because if there was one thing Mike had taught him over the years, it was that when you were upset, you had to do it in _style_. "This is pointless. We've got a whole damn country in front of us – no, wait, we have the entire _world_. How are we supposed to figure out where forty people are in the whole world?"

Mike, hunched over a somewhat crumpled map of the United States that had he had found shoved, unused, into one of the suitcases they'd purchased for their end-of-high-school road trip that never was (because Mike just _had_ to get appendicitis the day before they were supposed to leave), didn't even bother to acknowledge him, but then again, Mike had had years of experience in learning how to ignore Jamie.

Rat bastard.

"I'm serious, man, we have no idea what we're doing. At this point we may as well just start throwing darts at the map and go to those places, because that would be as helpful as what we're doing now."

Jamie was feeling charitable, so the "that is, jack shit" went unspoken.

The look Mike was giving him was calculating, as if what Jamie had proposed was actually by any stretch of the imagination a good idea, and that was a little concerning.

"You're pretty good at darts," Mike said.

Jamie rolled his eyes. "Yeah, but if you'd recall, Buck was better."

Now it was Mike's turn to scoff. "He ain't here right now, so I mean, you could give it a go."

Jamie stared.

"Dude, I wasn't _serious_. We can't just get up and go driving and expect that it'll all just work out. We don't have that kind of money, or the time, seeing as I for one don't want to lose my job. I mean, God, we barely even have a _car_!"

"My car is great!"

"Your car probably couldn't make it more than three states without falling apart, and we can't afford to get a new one _or_ to pay for plane tickets, especially when we _still don't know where to go_. We can't just pick places at random, it'll never work."

Mike smiled at him in that smug way he always got when he was getting under Jamie's skin and enjoying it.

God, why had he picked this loser to be his best friend in _two_ lifetimes?

"I think it'll work."

"Well that's great, I'm glad you do, but it won't, and that's why we're not doing it."

"I bet you it will."

"We aren't _betting_ on this, Mikey, _Christ_! You and I both have to work, we can't just get up and leave for like, fucking _California_ on a whim-"

"So we won't do California. Why can't we just try somewhere local first?" Mike's face was infuriatingly calm and more than a little amused.

"What the hell makes you think that would work?"

Mike shrugged, frustratingly nonchalant. "Think of how many Pennsylvania guys there were last time: Winters, Welsh, Joe Toye – hell, Spina was from Philly! I figure, if we ended up in the same place again, some of those guys must have, too. And it's more likely that guys would have moved to big cities now, for work and school and shit – who's to say we might not have another guy right here in Philly, huh?"

Part of Jamie wanted to throw out the idea on principle, because the chances of everyone ending up where they came from before seemed kind of outlandish, seeing as some of those guys came from ridiculously small towns where people would recognize that a guy looked exactly the same as some old former resident. Based on numbers alone, the idea seemed outlandish, impossible.

But then, there was a certain logic to it all. Things had worked out so far, everything just so happening to fall together in the correct, improbable manner, and if that wasn't being orchestrated then Jamie would eat one of Cearnach's stupid knee-high boots. Too many serendipitous things had happened so far – Jamie and Mike just so happening to grow up as best friends in the same city where they lived the first time, just so happening to go to the carnival, to trip over the one stall where the book was located – for there not to be something trying to guide them, to get them to follow a preset path.

Jamie couldn't imagine that the thing guiding them was Cearnach, or if it was, then that path would undoubtedly lead somewhere extremely unpleasant.

As it was, though, it seemed that there was a chance that there was something prescribed about their experiences so far, and if that was true, then it stood to reason that Mike could be right. There _were_ a lot of Easy guys from Pennsylvania, after all.

It wouldn't hurt them to at least give Mike's idea a chance. They were already in Philly – wandering around the city for a while looking for familiar faces on a night off couldn't hurt anyone, right?

~~~

Well, in the end it didn't end up hurting anyone or anything, except for maybe someone's pride. But you didn't get a Purple Heart for wounded pride, so Babe didn't feel too badly about it.

Plus, this was going to make a fucking _hilarious_ story for the guys.

All of the best Easy Company stories _did_ include somebody's ass, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should note that like none of this is edited or beta'd because I don't have the patience for that, so I'll just let my typos linger on the internet for months until I notice them and quickly edit them in shame....


	5. Gettin' Handsy With the COs, or Everything Babe Never Wanted to Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys find their first ~~victim~~ guy from the list, and it's an experience, to say the least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to be at work in less than five hours so I shouldn't even be up right now but I very badly wanted to finish this chapter (and also see the end of the hockey game - my team won, so all is forgiven), so keep in mind, this is 1am levels of unedited typos. And in other news, I finished my notes! And my map! And my calendar! This should be exciting for you guys because it means I essentially have the rest of the story all planned out - I just have to actually get around to writing it...
> 
> Also, please note that all of my information about the geography and traffic patterns of Philadelphia came from a helpful anon who kindly answered my hyper-specific call for help - I know nothing about the area, so I apologize if I got anything severely weird or wrong, but that's pretty much going to be my mantra throughout the fic so you might want to get your outrage out of your system now.

As it turned out, Mike's genius idea to track down more Easy Company guys in Philadelphia consisted, characteristically, of going out drinking.

"That's your great idea? We're gonna go out and get drunk on a Sunday night and that's going to magically make one of the guys appear?"

"Well usually on a Sunday we would be drinking at  _home_ , so yes. It's  _different_  – we don't know what the Sunday night bar crowds are like."

"I've worked the Sunday night bar crowd before. They look like every other bar crowd ever."

"But this one won't, because this time, we're gonna find a reincarnated World War II vet in there."

"I admire your enthusiasm, but you're wrong."

Apparently it didn't matter how wrong Mike was, because Jamie still followed him to the bar, still just as doggedly loyal as he was when they were six and Mike insisted that if Jamie ran with him as fast as he could smack into the tree in Mike's backyard, they could go to Narnia. It had obviously failed, unless the real goal was to send the two of them to the emergency room in need of stitches for their heads and for the new assholes their mothers had ripped them, but Mike to this day insisted that if that tree was turned into a wardrobe, it would have worked, and Jamie was still just as stupidly loyal to that headstrong idiot.

Maybe Jamie was the real idiot here.

Thankfully, he was at least able to convince Mike not to head to one of their usual hangouts with the insistence that they had never seen anybody they recognized now as a member of Easy at one of those bars, and no, the "Sunday crowd" really did not differ that much from the rest-of-the-week crowd.

The problem with that was that now, Jamie and Mike had to find a new bar. One that was out of their comfort zones.

At least two bars on their tour of downtown were discarded out of hand because they "looked like where hipsters came to die" and it was summarily agreed that no friend of theirs would ever go there. The next one they found was so seedy that Jamie felt the urge to check around and make sure it hadn't in fact been set up by somebody from the carnival. It had about the same levels of stickiness, sketchy eye-patches and tetanus as the carnival did.

Finally, after what was honestly much too much searching just to find a bar in downtown Philly, they came across a place that they deemed acceptable. Well, not  _acceptable_ , but they didn't think they would die there, from the sanitary standards or embarrassment.

Or maybe not.

"This is so embarrassing," Mike grumbled, hunched over his beer and looking around shiftily as if the atmosphere might infect it if he didn't protect it.

"Yeah, but at least it's  _clean_ , and I'm not afraid that somebody here is going to try to shank me, or tell me about what natural products they use in their beard or play any more goddamn ukulele music."

"Why do hipsters love ukuleles so much?" Mike stared at Jamie like an oversized, forlorn puppy, his chin slumped against the top of his glass.

"Why were there so many bikes out front without brakes? Obviously, this is all because they have death wishes."

"But you know, a death wish at least means you're like, living on the edge or some shit. These bastards...I don't know what they're living on."

"Drugs, probably," Jamie said with a knowing nod. "Drugs and miserable office promotions."

The bar required Jamie to describe something as "preppy" for the first time in his life, because there was no real way to explain this place otherwise. There were a lot of guys in polo shirts and khaki cargo shorts, enough to signify that either a fraternity had wandered in, or these were a lot of office bros on their day off, the type who were often peons at law firms who saw themselves and their jobs as just a little too important. (Jamie could tell, because he had heard the phrase "well  _my_  account" at least three times since coming in the door.)

It didn't have the music or the atmosphere of a club, but half of the occupants acted like it did, laughing too loudly, grinding up on people to some beat that absolutely did not match the music (can you really grind to a Journey song?), and getting ridiculously drunk considering the majority of them probably had office jobs to get back to in the morning.

"It's like another world," Mike breathed, his eyes widened in horrified awe.

"It's how the upper-middle class lives," Jamie agreed. "It's what happens when you trap someone in a cubicle all day and make them talk about, like, taxes and meetings and shit."

"You have to wear a polo shirt and tell every girl you meet about how many sales you've made this week?"

"The girls are all talking about their work too, so I think this might just be how people flirt here."

Mike looked around again, taking in the scene around them, and shook his head.

"You know what Jamie-boy? For the first time in my life, I think I can say that I'm glad I'm poor."

"Or glad you don't work a corporate job, at least. But then again, they  _are_  probably making triple what you do."

"But at what cost, Jamie?  _At what cost_?"

Jamie's reply was cut off, because somebody apparently discovered that there was a jukebox in this bar, and suddenly Jamie's old friend Pitbull was interrupting him to inform him once again that he was Mr. Worldwide.

" _I love this song_!" somebody near the bar shouted.

The bartender's expression was pained. Jamie knew that feeling.

Poor bastard. At least the drunks at Jamie's bar had a better taste in music. Well, they did after somebody removed the jukebox.

"I feel like we're not going to find somebody here," Jamie mused, voice raised to be heard over the now-pounding music.

Mike made a face as if almost nervous. "I'm not sure I  _want_  to find somebody here. I mean, this is getting-"

"Am I drunk?" somebody next to their table loudly asked.

Mike gave Jamie a "case in point" look. "Yes, you are," he told the man without even bothering to glance at him. "Like I said, Jamie, it's-"

"Mike..."

"I  _am_  drunk!" the man crowed happily. "And I'm either so drunk that I can't see my friends, or they're so drunk that  _I_  can't see them."

Mike rolled his eyes. "...Yeah, that's really special, thanks for sharing, pal, but we're-"

" _Mike!_ " Jamie hissed again.

" _What?_ " Mike looked ready to roll his eyes again, but he first turned them into the direction where Jamie was fervently gesturing – namely, at the widely-grinning man who had propped himself up against their table for support.

" _Holy shit!_ " he yelped.

The man only smiled wider at him. "Holy shit yourself," he said, patting Mike's arm. "But most people just call me Peter."

Most people except for Jamie and Mike, because they would have called him Captain Lewis Nixon III.

Apparently Major Winters's pet alcoholic hadn't changed too much in his second life.

Mike's face was experiencing the confused facial spasms of someone caught between jumping up and down to gloat that he'd been right all along and staring open-mouthed and stuttering like a fish would if a fish could stutter and also wasn't a fish.

"I – you – I was  _right_!"

And naturally, because it was Mike, he settled on gloating.

"That's  _awesome_." Nixon had now sunk into a full slump atop the table, his cheek pressed to the tacky wooden surface while he spoke in a flat voice, mostly addressing Mike's beer. "I'm so glad for you."

Jamie stared down at him, struggling to put his thoughts into words, or to even  _have_  coherent thoughts. This was – well, saying it was too easy would be like saying that George Luz thought the sound of his own voice was "just okay." This was being handed their objective on a silver platter and being paid to take it, and Jamie knew better than to look any gift horses in the mouth, but he also knew that sometimes the gift horse would turn out to be a donkey in disguise – a jackass, one might say. And those never boded well.

"Hey, buddy." He prodded carefully at Nixon's arm when he didn't immediately respond. "Uh, Peter, right? Hey, are you okay?"

He obviously wasn't okay, seeing as he'd wandered up to a pair of strangers in a bar and all but passed out half-draped on their table, muttering about his friends being gone, but Jamie had to start somewhere.

"Oh, I'm just  _great_." Nixon's voice was muffled against the table now. Jamie exchanged a look with Mike over his head. This was, quite possibly, worse than Mike after Cinco de Mayo. And Mike was a  _big_  fan of Cinco de Mayo.

"I'm drunk in a bar, y'know, just hanging out with my two new bestest friends in the world because my real  _friends_  decided to ditch me, and my boss is a prick and my girlfriend broke up with me because I'm 'emotionally unavailable' and my cat doesn't even  _like_  me!"

He looked up at Jamie and Mike with wide, miserable eyes and whispered, "My cat is such a dick."

Jamie and Mike shared another look over his head.

"I didn't know it was possible," Jamie said, "But I think he might actually be a sloppier drunk than last time."

"Oh, definitely."

"Last time?"

Of all of the things for Nixon to pay attention to, he just  _had_  to key in on that one.

Frantically, Jamie searched for a lie. "Oh, uh, yeah, man, last time! We met you here before, remember? Yeah, we're totally bros now."

Mike was nodding fervently in agreement. The look in Nixon's eyes wasn't even discerning, but something more along the lines of confused as he scrunched up his face and squinted at them.

"Oh. We have? ... _Oh_ , hey, yeah, I remember that! That night with the, with the – the thing! Hey buddy, how are you?" He somehow managed to lever himself into a somewhat upright position, enough so that he could clap a clammy, wavering hand on Jamie's shoulder; said hand then slid limply down his arm because Nixon's fingers were like noodles.

"Yeah man, that was a great time." They didn't have a clue what it was, but if there was one thing Jamie excelled at, it was lying to drunk people. "And we're doing great too. But uh, you don't look like you're doing so well yourself, aside from the, uh, shitty friends and the bitchy cat or whatever. Can you, like...is there somebody we should call for you?"

That was probably a mistake, because Jamie abruptly found his shoulder being utilized as a pillow as Nixon slumped against him and sighed loudly. Jamie was almost too busy staring at him in abject frozen horror to hear what he said.

"No. My  _friends_  obviously don't care about me and my parents don't live here and my cat can't drive."

Jamie would have just kept staring at Nixon like he was a bug that was too big for Jamie to try to kill it but also one he wanted to go away  _right now_ , except Mike delivered a swift (and harsh,  _ow_ ) kick to his shin to get his attention. He jerked his head in Nixon's direction and whispered, "Taxi?"

This, it seemed, Nixon wasn't paying attention to, mostly because he was too busy trying to – look through Jamie's pockets, what the fuck?

Jamie did his best to unobtrusively shrug Nixon off, which wasn't really possible, and said, "I don't know, do you think he could get himself home without just like passing out on the sidewalk where he's dropped off?"

"Probably not," Nixon himself mused, fingers  _still_  curling around the edge of Jamie's jacket pocket.

"Dude, knock it off."

"Sorry." Except he absolutely wasn't knocking it off.

Jamie glared at him, and then at Mike in turn, because this whole thing was Mike's idea and therefore his fault too. Mike, because he was a dick just like Nixon's cat, really didn't seem to care.

"So, uh, hey, Peter? Do you want me and my buddy Jamie here to help you get home?"

Nixon thought for a moment and then shrugged, which, given his position against Jamie, was really just more like shoving Jamie to the side which like, really, what the fuck?

"I dunno. I could probably do it myself. Like. Eventually. I'd get there eventually. Maybe tomorrow."

"After waking up on the sidewalk?" Jamie asked warily.

"Yes."

"Shit, okay, so that one's out. Look, maybe we could...where do you live, man, maybe we could drop you off."

A small part of Jamie – maybe not so small actually but just  _Jamie_  – was irritated that he would even think of offering to go out of his way in downtown traffic for God-knows-how-long to help some drunk stranger who was currently getting much too handsy with him, just because it was somebody who Babe knew and who Jamie needed to tag.

But then the other part of him, the Babe part, never even considered that there were more options than playing Nixon-minder in Winters's absence.

God, but his head was feeling ten different kinds of fucked up and conflicted right now, and the drunk guy currently breathing against his cheek was doing absolutely nothing to help that.

After a look of supreme concentration Nixon finally answered, "Haddonfield."

Jamie and Mike shared a glance.

"Of  _course_  you do," Mike muttered, shaking his head. "Let me guess, your parents are still loaded?"

"Yes," Nixon said plainly, his face wide and earnest and much too close to Jamie's own. "They bought me the house, but I think it was just to get me to go live somewhere away from them."

Well if that wasn't a kick in the gut, the poor bastard.

"Okay, how about we..." Jamie did his best to haul Nixon away from him and onto the seat next to him, with only minimal success; Nixon's hand was  _still_  in his jacket pocket (and it wasn't even the one with his wallet in it), but at least he wasn't pressed up against Jamie's side anymore.

"How about we drop you off at home, alright buddy? We'll make sure you get home alright, and like, feed your cat or whatever."

Nixon stared at him for much too long, his eyes looking sharper than they had all night.

"Why would you do that?"

Jamie tried not to waver under the sudden soft clarity in his voice.

"Because we're friends, right?" He shared another look with Mike. "You said so yourself, we're all old pals, and you need a hand, and we've got a car. It's no big deal, we'll just drop you off at home, make sure you get in okay, nothing funny, trust me. We're just worried about you, man."

Nixon's eyes slid away from Jamie's face just as his hand slid across the table to grab at Jamie's mostly-empty glass, sliding it around idly and staring fixedly at the condensation there.

"Well that's a new one," he said in what he probably thought was a quiet voice to himself.

Jamie could feel himself wincing; Mike dropped his head into his hands.

"God, you know, I knew Winters did a whole lot for us but I don't think I ever realized how much work went into  _this_  part of his job."

Nixon's face was back on the table, pillowed on one of his arms while the other drew lazy pictures in the condensation on the glass. "Who's that?"

Mike looked at Jamie with wide eyes.

Oh, no, that one wasn't on him. Mike brought it up, Mike could handle it all on his own.

 _Traitor_ , Mike mouthed. Then he turned to Nixon, shifting awkwardly in his seat.

"That's, uh...our old boss, nice guy, I bet you'd like him. He'd probably like you too, actually."

How much were they actually allowed to say? This felt kind of early to be pushing the limits on the rules already, but they were probably getting pretty damn close.

"You think so?" And damn it, that wasn't a tone any of them wanted to address.

"Uh, yeah, man. He's a really great guy and you and he would probably get along great."

Nixon sighed, his face relaxing. "That sounds cool."

Mike's increasingly desperate eyes met Jamie's once again.

"Uh, yeah, sure. So, like...do you want to come with us now, or...?"

The sigh this time was louder and somehow even more dramatic; if Nixon wanted to audition for the theatrical part of a bellows any time soon, he probably had the flair to pull it off.

"Yeah, I guess."

Thankfully, his gaze was on the glass and not on Jamie and Mike fist pumping and exchanging an air high-five.

Agreeing to go with them and actually  _getting_  anywhere were two totally different issues.

It wasn't too difficult to fold Nixon into the backseat of Mike's car, not with all of Jamie's experience in maneuvering drunken idiots (he was sure to inform Mike of this very loudly). The bigger issues included things like Nixon forgetting his own address.

"It's the white house," he told Jamie very seriously once they had him settled in and buckled up.

Jamie, the sacrificial lamb chosen in a vicious game of rock-paper-scissors to sit in back with Nixon and make sure he didn't like, puke all over the floor or concuss himself on the ancient window cranks, blinked at him and said in his blandest tone, "It's the white house."

"Mhmm." Nixon nodded his head against the window, probably smearing God only knew what kinds of hair product on the already thoroughly fingerprinted glass. "The white house in Haddonfield. With a black roof!"

Mike turned in the driver's seat, leaning back to look at them. "And let me guess, it has a red door?"

"Yeah!"

He rolled his eyes. "Jesus Christ, I think he lives in a four year old's crayon drawing."

"In Haddonfield," Jamie chirped helpfully.

Mike flipped him off; apparently he didn't find it very helpful.

"You don't know the street or anything? The zip code?"

"It's in Haddonfield," Nixon repeated again, his voice solemn. Then he said, as if quoting something he'd mocked often, "'It's a very lovely and affluent town in the south of New Jersey where all the best Philadelphians live.'"

Mike was already rolling his eyes when Jamie turned to look at him. "Yeah, sure, okay. So Mommy and Daddy made sure to send you away to where all the  _other_  rich people in New Jersey live. Can you tell us any more about it than that?"

"I have the address in my phone!"

"Finally!" Mike and Jamie crowed in unison, Mike dramatically throwing his arms in the air and slumping back against his seat.

"I can't remember my password."

"You –  _what_?"

Nixon helpfully dropped his phone into Jamie's lap. It was lit with the lock screen and a photo of an exceptionally bitchy looking orange tabby cat.

"His name is Kevin, but because he's such an asshole, most of the time I just call him Dick."

It took a while to get back to the problem at hand because Jamie and Mike were too busy laughing hysterically until tears came to their eyes.

"Call him Dick!" Mike insisted, his voice coming in helpless gasps, "Just make that his name, it's a great name for a cat, you should keep that one."

"It's the  _best_  name," Jamie agreed.

"Yeah, but when I call him that at the vet's office everyone gives me disappointed looks."

"It's just Richard, man, you can make it his middle name! Cats can have middle names, right? Call him Kevin Richard." If Jamie was going to get one thing out of this night other than an unfortunate tattoo of Lewis Nixon's name, then he was going to get this.

Mike looked at him with wide, fervent eyes.

"Kevin Richard Nixon," he whispered, and that set them off all over again. Nixon didn't really seem to know what was going on, but he laughed along anyway.

Everything was both so much easier and so much harder when people were drunk, but in this case, Nixon's inability to keep from over-sharing turned out to be their saving grace.

"Holy shit, dude, your password is 'Dick'?" Jamie squinted in disbelief at the now-unlocked phone in his hands. "I was just trying it as a joke!"

Nixon leaned against his shoulder to squint at the phone. "Huh. I guess it is."

Mike looked close to dying in laughter again, but Jamie ignored him in an attempt to be even mildly productive by digging through the contact information on Nixon's phone. That, at least, was something that Nixon had apparently done right, because he'd put in his own contact information in his address book.

When Jamie finally thumbed over the right contact, Nixon – or Peter Cavanaugh, according to the phone – made a happy noise. "There it is!" he cheered. "See, I knew it was there somewhere. I added it in when I moved here, because I kept forgetting my address."

"You  _still_  don't know your address," Mike commented, having apparently finally calmed down.

"Yeah. It's a problem."

"Well either way, it's fixed now." Jamie input the address on his own phone and pulled up the driving directions. "Okay, boys, let's go to Haddonfield."

As they finally set out for New Jersey, Nixon slumped heavily against Jamie's side, his happy smile lit by the blue glow of his phone as he clutched at it close to his face, carefully examining the background photo of his cat.

"Would you look at that," he said, either to the cat or himself. "I'm going on an adventure! With friends!"

It was dumb, and Nixon was drunker than Mike at the carnival, but Nixon sounded so delighted and surprised that Jamie couldn't find it in himself to mock him for it.

"Yeah man." He patted awkwardly at the side of Nixon's head, currently resting once again on his shoulder; Nixon's hand was, once again, curled around his pocket.

"Yeah, we're going on an adventure."

~~~

The real adventure of the night appeared to be watching how apoplectic Mike could get in traffic trying to get from downtown Philly to Haddonfield, New Jersey. Usually that sort of trip wouldn't be a huge issue late on a Sunday night, but the Phillies game had let out late – a loss, what else – and apparently in protest two drunk fans had taken it upon themselves to stop right in the middle of the road and have it out with each other. On a normal day, Mike would have been all over this, because cheering on drunken idiots starting a road brawl was probably one of his favorite little-known activities, but today they were on some semblance of a schedule trying to get their own drunken idiot home (and for once, said drunken idiot was not Mike), and therefore, Mike wasn't particularly pleased, and he was dead-set on making it known.

"How is this my life?" he asked the steering wheel as he repeatedly tapped his forehead against it, "How is this my fucking life? Jamie, tell me how this is my life."

Before Jamie could actually say anything Mike was leaning out his window again and barking, "Settle it after class, you fuckwits!"

He was summarily ignored, but Jamie hoped he at least felt better.

"I'm glad that we can all spend this time together," Nixon sighed, his voice not much more than a drowsy smear of a slur. His wandering hand was, of course, tucked in Jamie's pocket. At this point Jamie was far past trying to dislodge him; as long as he made this trip without puking, he could do whatever he wanted. (Jamie didn't know what kind of drunk Nixon was in this life, but he'd been burned enough times before to know to be wary – just because Mike said he was sorry didn't mean it wouldn't happen again.)

"Yeah, bud. I'm just so, so glad."

"Get out of the fucking road, jackass!"

Mike laid on the horn like he could get a prize for enthusiasm. This, at least, garnered support from the other cars piled up behind him, preventing him from turning around.

One of the guys in the road started teetering back to his car at the coaxing of his nearly-as-drunk buddy, until a comment from his combatant caused him to spin around and come roaring back and now the two were actually coming to physical blows.

That, at least, seemed to make Mike happy.

"A ticket to Colonial Williamsburg!" Nixon exclaimed.

Jamie and Mike both turned to stare at him. He waved a slip of paper at them.

"I heard about that, my mom wanted to go to a reenactment. Is it any good? I'm not like, into all that old-timey stuff but apparently the houses are nice enough that she actually envies them or whatever."

Mike squinted at him, and Jamie reached over to tug the paper from his hand and, when he wouldn't let go, rolled his eyes and pulled Nixon's whole hand closer. "Where'd you even get this from, down the seat cushions or something?"

Nixon nodded happily, his smile proud.

"Shit, I told you they didn't even pretend to clean out this car before selling it to me, didn't I, Jamie?"

Mike had gotten the car secondhand from somebody who'd gotten it something like fifth-hand, and it didn't look like any of those previous owners had ever thought to take a vacuum to it. Periodically things worked their way forth from the recesses of the seat cushions: so far they'd found a green toy soldier, two hard candies, countless ancient receipts and ninety-four cents (and a Canadian nickel), and apparently, a crumpled up ticket to Colonial Williamsburg.

"Yeah, and I know I told you that just because they'd set a precedent for not cleaning didn't mean you weren't allowed to."

"But it's the principle of the thing! This car ain't used to cleaning, for all we know the dirt's what's holding it together!"

At this point the police had shown up, and a cheer arose from the open windows of the other cars trapped without air-conditioning in the muggy June air as they struggled through sorting out what, exactly, was going on, and how they were supposed to both arrest the men involved and also get their cars out of the street.

"Thank  _fuck_!" Mike shouted as he fell dramatically back against his seat.

Jamie swatted at Nixon's hand, which was once again digging around in his pocket. "Cool it, dude."

Nixon flashed him a loose, glassy-eyed smile and gave his pocket a friendly pat. "There, now it's safe."

A quick glance revealed that Nixon had kindly gifted him his trash in the form of the old ticket.

"Wow. Thanks."

The smile got bigger. "You're welcome."

" _Finally_!" Mike somehow made three syllables into nine. He looked near to delighted tears as the cops finally shuffled the guys into separate cruisers and started moving their cars at least to the side of the road. Mike's face as he restarted the engine was downright euphoric.

"Less cheering, more driving," Jamie quipped.

It was a testament to Mike's excitement that he didn't get flipped off.

The rest of their trip was thankfully uneventful – the drive to Haddonfield wasn't too busy on a Sunday night, especially once you got over the river into New Jersey. Nixon had fallen quiet, mostly just staring out the window with that same pleased smile on his face, his hand still in Jamie's pocket; Mike's smile matched, because apparently righteous vindication really made his night.

Finding Nixon's house wasn't too difficult now that they had an actual address to go by, though his instructions (a white house with a black roof and a red door in Haddonfield) became useful once they were on the right street. And to be fair, his description wasn't inaccurate, but it really didn't do justice to the sheer size of the house.

"Christ," Jamie hissed under his breath as he stepped out of the car. Mike whistled lowly.

" _Damn_ , what do you need all that house for, man?"

It was an old-school three-story Victorian, the kinds that were a dime a dozen in older neighborhoods, but this one – like the rest of the neighborhood, it seemed – was well-kept and hadn't been split into multiple apartments like the ones Jamie usually saw. The lawn and garden were pristine and obviously the work of a professional, because there was no life in which Jamie could imagine Lewis Nixon having the interest, let alone the skill, to be a gardener.

Nixon barked a laugh, and something about his face twisted in a way that was familiar. He looked more like himself, like the Nixon that Jamie had known, than he had all night.

"Nah, this is the small stuff where the plebians get to live. If you want to see the big houses, the kind that my parents would really deem okay to live in, you have to go a few streets over, get closer to the country club and all that." He leaned in conspiratorially, despite the dead quiet of the street around them, and said, "I was informed that if I get married to a nice respectable girl, I can upgrade to one of those."

There was something just  _off_  enough about his tone to give Jamie pause, something a little too brittle about that suddenly familiar smile.

"But like...do you even want that? Do you even want them buying you off to live somewhere else?"

Nixon's laugh was long and loud and he stumbled in his steps, grabbing roughly onto Jamie's shoulder to keep from tripping over his own feet. He leaned in close, and there was none of his smile in his eyes.

"Between you and me, if I wanted to do any of that, I wouldn't have been exiled off to Haddonfield in the first place with the promise that things would be better if I 'changed my mind,' if you catch my drift."

Oh.

"Oh."

The smile was just as brittle as Nixon clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Yeah, oh. There's a reason my girlfriend thought I was 'emotionally unavailable.' But it's okay. A miserable life in Haddonfield is at least an expenses-mostly-paid miserable life away from them."

Jamie couldn't tell if he was really as happy about that as he tried to make himself sound, but it didn't matter, because then Nixon tried to do an about-face and head towards his door and only succeeded in tripping over some of the garden edging that lined his front walkway and falling flat on his face into the flower bed.

This, at least, Jamie knew how to deal with.

"Okay, okay, let's get you inside." He and Mike swarmed Nixon, each one grabbing up an arm and hauling him to his feet.

Nixon was examining a cluster of daisies he'd apparently crushed in his fall, one of them looking crumpled and sad in his hand. He wordlessly reached out and tucked it into Jamie's goddamn pocket.

"There, keep that safe for me, will you?"

Jamie didn't even bother attempting not to roll his eyes as he and Mike began hauling Nixon to the door. "Yeah, sure, okay."

Luckily Nixon hadn't lost his keys, which was a miracle unto itself, and after they hustled him up the steps and through the doorway, the only real issue was getting him upstairs and into bed in one piece. Logically, Jamie knew they could just dump him on the couch and he'd be absolutely fine – they'd returned him safely home, which was more than they'd ever been obligated to do – but it just didn't feel right.

"C'mon," he sighed, steering Nixon towards the stairs. Stairs were apparently a little bit outside of Nixon's skill-set right now, so that was an experience that took far too long, especially when they ran into a fat ginger tabby that hissed, swiped at them and ran off (it really  _was_  a dick), but the upside was that Nixon was at least able to direct them to his bedroom easily enough.

Nixon looked happy to just loll around there, have sprawled on his unmade bed in his rather sad looking room, but there was something about the situation – and maybe it was his experience in doing this for Mike all the time making him soft and sympathetic – that made Jamie sigh and say, "Alright, let's get some of this off."

Thankfully, unlike Mike, Nixon didn't make any innuendos as Jamie grimaced and helped him get his shoes off.

Actual-Mike, on the other hand, was still standing in the doorway, utterly unhelpful, and giving Jamie an appraising look.

"You feeling domestic there, princess?"

"You feeling like a decent person today, dickwad?"

Mike snorted, but he pushed his way off the doorframe and came over, helping Jamie with the unenviable job of stripping Nixon of his pants, because there was nothing comfortable about sleeping in black slacks and a belt.

"You know," Nixon mused at the ceiling, "When I was in college I had fantasies about something like this, but I was a lot less drunk and the guys involved were a lot more attractive." He paused, and then added, "No offense."

And  _there_  was the innuendo.

Jamie and Mike froze at the same time, their hands now uncomfortable on Nixon's waist, partway through trying to remove his pants with zero help on his end.

"Uh...none taken, man."

"I'd rather not be included if it's all the same to you," Mike grumbled, getting back to the task at hand with added force.

His elbow digging into Jamie's side was both unpleasant and unexpected.

"The fuck, man?" Jamie hissed.

Mike was trying to make some sort of complicated gestures between Jamie and Nixon; Jamie shook his head. "Use your words, Mikey."

"Don't you think that this would be a good time for..." He gestured between Jamie and an increasingly sleepy Nixon, and when Jamie shook his head again, he tugged at the collar of his shirt, revealing a brief flash of the red, brand-like spade over his heart.

"Oh." Jamie stared dumbly at the man in front of him. Admittedly, now was the ideal time to tag him – he was relatively unaware and had a lot of bare skin available to Jamie (and that didn't feel skeezy at all), and there was ample opportunity to choose somewhere that he wouldn't be likely to notice right away, though then again, there was a chance he wouldn't remember most of this night very well anyway.

But Nixon looked  _vulnerable_ , and given the amount of information that Jamie had learned about him over the past few hours...well, even if it was for his own good, doing something like this when he was in this sort of state just felt kind of creepy.

"Are you serious right now?" Mike hissed. "Take Nike's advice and just fucking do it already, Christ."

That spurred Jamie into motion. "I'm doing it, I'm doing it. I just don't know where..."

There were so many unobtrusive options available to Jamie, places that Nixon could easily hide with clothes and none of which Jamie wanted to touch.

Abruptly Mike's voice was right next to his ear as he whispered, "You should tag his ass."

Jamie wasn't proud of the yelp he let out, but it apparently wasn't enough to wake the newly-sleeping Nixon, so it couldn't have been too loud.

" _Jesus_ , man, lay off! What the hell is wrong with you?"

Naturally, Mike's face was the picture of innocence. "I'm just saying, it would be hilarious, like wearing a jersey with '69' on it. Besides, asses are like Easy Company tradition by now."

"That's not true and you know it."

"It  _is_ , or at least a little – look, I  _want_  it to be true, so you should do it, because I said so and you love me."

"That's terrible reasoning."

"Terrible?" Mike made what he probably thought was an appealing face. "Or excellent?"

"...No, it's still terrible."

Mike scoffed. "What the fuck ever, you should do it anyway." As if sensing Jamie might be wavering he added, "Come on, Jamie-cakes, let me have this one thing. This  _one_  little thing. I just want to see Winters's face if-"

" _Ew!_ Ew, no, why would you even-"

"I'm just  _saying_ , if he reacted then we'd know-"

"I don't want to know! I never wanted to know!"

Mike squinted at him as if he didn't quite believe him.

"Then Christ, Jamie, what the hell kind of gay are you?"

Jamie didn't see red, but he sure as hell turned it.

He punched Mike's arm. "The kind that's  _not fucking gay_ , asshole."

"Jamie, you know you don't have to  _lie_  about it to me, I know-"

"You don't fucking know anything."

He could feel his face burning red with all of the words he never wanted to hear piling up around him, covering thick and too warm, a wool blanket on a summer night.

Shaking himself and willing to do anything to change the subject, he gritted his teeth and jammed a hand as quickly as possible up the back of Nixon's boxer leg, cringing as he hit skin and nearly whimpering, "Tag!"

He pulled his hand away, feeling scalded. The surprise of his actions had had their desired effect, though, because Mike had finally shut up in favor of gawking and then grabbing at Jamie's arm, pulling back the unseasonably long sleeves Jamie had insisted on wearing to cover his arm and staring hard at it. They both watched as the angry red letters of "Lewis Nixon" turned smooth and black.

"There," Jamie said after a pause. "We're done. So can we go?"

They both turned to look at Nixon, passed out with his pants just barely off and undoubtedly a fresh birthmark on his ass.

Mike made a face. "He'll be...well, maybe not okay, but  _Nix_ , at least."

"Yeah." Jamie nodded faintly. "We'll just...go."

And never talk about any of this again.

Mike mumbled an agreement and they beat a hasty exit, before Mike cursed and doubled back, disappearing into the master bathroom and running a tap. He came out thirty seconds later with a glass of water and some ibuprofen. When he placed them on the nightstand next to Nixon's prone form, his apologetic frown was entirely for Jamie.

Jamie shrugged, and then nodded.

"Yeah, okay, come on."

The look on Mike's face was relieved, like a puppy that had been told he did well, and he clapped a hand on Jamie's back, sliding it up to squeeze the nape of his neck.

They exited the house, Jamie sighing in the quiet, nearly-summer air.

Mike meant well. He didn't always know when to quit it, when the joke stopped being funny, but he never meant anyone any harm.

It was just that there were some things that Jamie didn't think he'd ever be willing to talk about, and Mike happened to know what each and every one of those things was.

And if there was one thing that Mike loved to do, it was talk.

But they didn't speak, not when they got into the car or when they drove back to the city. They didn't speak until they were safely in their crappy little apartment, sitting next to each other on the couch well past midnight, staring blankly together at the dark television.

As always, it was Mike to break the silence.

"So. Was it at least a nice ass?"

If they had throw pillows, Jamie would have hit him with one. Because they didn't, he just had to hit Mike with himself, sending him tumbling to the floor in a fit of sharp limbs and sharper curses.

Jamie really did feel a little bit better.

And he never wanted to talk about Lewis Nixon's ass ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I liked the map I made so much, I decided it might be helpful for you guys too, so I started a new one that I'm going to update as the story progresses so you can follow along with the progress that the guys have made. With that being said, the map will be spoilery soon if you haven't read all the way through the fic yet, as I'm updating it when I update the fic, so don't look at it if you want to avoid spoilers.
> 
>  
> 
> [Map](https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1759631#)


	6. Behind Enemy Lines, or Bill's Guide to Insulting an Entire City in One Weekend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jamie and Mike play tourist in enemy territory, because every adventure has to start somewhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive me for the typos here, because my "m" key is sticking and it turns out that telling yourself "I am finishing this chapter tonight if it kills me" is not always the best plan. Also, you should all know that I made myself refrain from including the definite article from in front of a highway number (i.e. "the I-70"), and I died a little bit inside, so you're welcome. I did that for _you_.
> 
> NOTE: I cannot recall a single time I have ever written a non-spoilery end note so PLEASEEEE do not read the end notes before reading the chapter or you'll probably spoil a good chunk of the chapter (same goes for the map, that's even worse).

The excuse was that they were going to see the Phillies play the Pirates in Pittsburgh, ostensibly to "insult the people of Pittsburgh in their own home." Or at least, that was what Jamie and Mike told their parents and bosses to explain their sudden weekend trip to Pittsburgh a week after the carnival.

The actual reason was much, much dumber than that.

As always, it was one of Mike's ideas.

"Look, I got it right last time, see? That means you have to listen to me now."

He'd been absolutely insufferable since they tagged Nixon. Jamie was pretty sure it was only the imperative to keep the game a secret that kept him from publicly gloating about his amazing intuition.

Considering the majority of Mike's "intuition" only pertained to an ability to predict when his bagel was perfectly toasted (a skill which was purportedly shared by the bagel setting on the toaster), Jamie wasn't such an eager believer, despite any evidence of Mike's recent success.

"It was dumb luck that we ran into Nix. We can't wander the damn country driving around and expecting to just trip over every guy on the list!"

Mike pouted, obviously offended, and walked over to the open window, their only source of ventilation in the stagnant apartment. He pulled out a cigarette, speaking around it while he tried to light it.

"We wouldn't just be wandering around, we'd be organized and shit."

"And how do you expect to do that when we haven't the slightest clue where everyone is? And I thought you told my ma you were quitting."

Mike rolled his eyes as he exhaled. "I told my ma I was quitting too, that's besides the point. What I'm saying is that it's just like before: you and I were from Philly last time, and we're from Philly again. Nixon was from New Jersey last time, and would you look at that, he's from New Jersey again! With all those guys from Pennsylvania last time, there's gotta still be some around other than us, and if they aren't hanging out in Philly, then what other place would young Pennsylvanian's congregate?"

"A bar?"

"Yes," Mike said, pointing at him with the hand holding his cigarette; Jamie tried not to wince when a bit of ash dropped onto the floor. "But that's not what I'm talking about. Loathe I am to admit it, Jamie-boy, but if they aren't in Philly, most Pennsylvanians in search of jobs and the high-life are gonna head to Pittsburgh."

" _Ew_."

The way that Mike shook his head was truly tragic. "I know. But they're just confused because they don't remember yet, and when they do remember, we'll teach them about their terrible life choices. But till then I think we gotta at least give it a shot and look over there, too."

Jamie leaned against the wall on the other side of the window and crossed his arms. "It's the same issue as last time, though. That's a whole city with thousands of people in it. How are we supposed to canvass the whole thing in what, a couple of days?"

Another drag from the cigarette. "Well first, the Phillies are playing the Pirates in Pittsburgh on Saturday. We tell everyone we won tickets or something and that's why we're calling off work last minute. You know how much Easy guys love baseball – America's pastime and all that shit. There's gotta be a chance of finding someone there. And then we play it by ear and go around the city a bit, see who we can stir up, and we come back Sunday night in time for me to make it to work Monday morning. It's foolproof!"

"It sounds terrible."

"Your face is terrible, and I'm a genius. Look, it worked last time, so you gotta let me have this. It's like a rule or something, I was right the last time so now you have to trust me."

He reached out to wrap a hand, thankfully not the one with a smoldering cigarette in it, around Jamie's shoulder.

In a hushed voice he added, "Plus, this means I get to insult the people of Pittsburgh in their own home. Let me have this, Jamie. Let _us_ have this."

It was a stupid idea, downright idiotic, really, but there had always been a certain quality to Mike's logic that appealed to Jamie. Usually the parts that insulted Pittsburgh.

Mike did know just how to appeal to Jamie's innate Philadelphian tendencies.

He sighed.

"We're gonna go shit-broke at this rate if we keep skipping work like this."

The cigarette hanging from Mike's smug smile turned it so painfully reminiscent of Bill that for a moment, Jamie felt like Babe himself. He felt like he could believe any bullshit thing that came out of Mike's mouth, because Jamie had always been a sucker for Mike and Babe had followed Bill into war and somehow, they both came out okay in the end.

And that was how they found themselves in the stands of a Pittsburgh Pirates game, hiked up in the nosebleeds purportedly because "this is where an Easy guy would sit" and they "didn't want to give the Pirates any more money than they had to" but honestly just because they couldn't afford anything better on a good day, let alone last minute.

The Phillies were losing – _typical_ – but that didn't stop Jamie and Mike from hurling insults the Pirates could never hear and offending the people in their immediate vicinity ("Why do you have the stupid towel? This ain't even football!"), except for this one dude behind them in a Phillies cap; he high-fived them. He was awesome.

But he sadly wasn't a familiar face despite the familiar logo, and neither were any of the fans in their section. They didn't recognize anybody shown on the jumbotron, or anybody wandering the concourse during or after the game. As far as they could figure by the time the game ended (a loss, naturally) and they were trickling out of the stadium in a crowd of too-happy Pirates fans, it seemed that there weren't any Easy Company men present – or at least, none that they could find.

Mike sniffed as delicately as was possible for him, which was something like a horse's snort. "Well," he said, "Good. That means that they probably all have good taste."

"Or they just aren't at the game and we missed them somewhere else in the city, or there's just nobody in the city at all because we should maybe try figuring out a way to _find_ people instead of just searching around blindly hoping to run into someone-"

" _Or_ they just have good taste. Christ, Jamie, stop being such a downer."

Resisting rolling his eyes was a hard thing. "I'm trying to be realistic. We could go to every baseball game in the country and never run into anybody. This sort of thing just isn't going to work, we don't have the money or the resources or the _time-_ "

His words jolted to a stop as Mike lightly checked him in the side, jostling him enough to get even more irritated looks from the people around them in the crowd, who were summarily ignored.

Mike's voice was quieter as he led the way to the car, leaning in close to Jamie so that they were bumping with nearly every step. "Listen, I know that, okay? I know that we can't actually just throw darts and figure it all out. But we gotta start somewhere, and here's as good as any place, right?"

He wrinkled his nose. "Well, not _this_ place in particular, but you know what I mean. I still think we should give this a chance, and if it doesn't work out, hey, at least we got a weekend of spitting on Pittsburgh."

When he got more than a few bitchy looks from the people around them he added, "Metaphorically! Christ, you people are so touchy. Don't you have some couches to be burning or some shit?"

"You did just say you were going to spit on them."

It was as if Jamie had shot him. " _Metaphorically!_ You know how my ma feels about people who just walk around spitting on shit."

"Yeah, and I know how your ma feels about you smoking too." Jamie nodded at the pack that Mike had been reaching for; with narrowed eyes, Mike slid it back into his pocket.

"I _am_ quitting," he muttered. "This shit is just stressful. It helps me think."

"Sure it does." Jamie clapped a hand on his shoulder. "That's why you've got such dumbass ideas."

"Oh, shut up." They were lucky that the crowd was starting to thin as they got closer to the lot they'd parked in, because otherwise Mike would have sent Jamie stumbling into the Pirates fans instead of just bumping them and then they may have had an actual problem on their hands. And while the police lock-up may have been a good place to look for some of the guys they'd known, it wasn't exactly at the top of the list of places Jamie wanted to check. Nor did he want to put himself into the same category as people who got into fights after baseball games.

He was saving his drunken fights for after hockey games, thanks much.

"So what exactly is your plan for tomorrow? Because I don't think that a guy who lived in Pittsburgh would be hanging around tourist places, so those are out, and besides, we don't really have the spare cash for a lot of those."

Mike hummed as they finally reached the car. "Nah," he sighed as he settled into the driver's seat, for once having foregone drinking at a sporting event because they were on some _serious business_. "I figure we'll just go to places where a lot of locals would be, see if we can spot anyone. So like, parks and the mall, probably."

"It's the preteen summer of my dreams."

"You bet your ass it is," Mike grunted, putting the car in gear and getting in the impossibly long line to exit the parking lot.

The strip motel they'd picked out to stay the night in had had the least-negative reviews they could find for places in their price range, so Jamie told himself he had to call it a win, even when the woman at the front desk skeptically asked "are you sure?" when they requested a room with two beds, and when said two-bed room came with a museum's worth of questionable stains.

"Remind me why we didn't go to the one down the road?" Jamie gave the worrisome brown mark on the thin carpet between the two beds a wary look.

Mike threw his duffle bag on the other bed, frowning when it gave a rusty groan in response. "Because this place was fifteen bucks cheaper and they found cockroaches in the bathroom of the other one. I'll take weird stains over live bugs any day."

"I just feel like I should have brought some carpet cleaner or something."

A second rusty groan followed as Mike sat next to his bag, bouncing experimentally and making the bed squeak unhappily. "Hey, at least it's not a frozen hole in the ground with German artillery coming down as a nightlight."

Jamie froze with his hands on the zipper of his own bag. "Oh. Yeah, I guess."

It still baffled him, how easily Mike could reference...before. A lot of the time over the past week he had gotten the sense that for Mike, there really wasn't much of a difference between himself and Bill. Maybe there wasn't. Maybe in his head, Mike and Bill were already one and the same and they just went by different names to cover their different histories.

Jamie couldn't do that. There was a difference between referencing guys he'd once known and claiming Babe's experiences for his own. He could talk about Luz, or Nixon, or Lip or any of those guys because in his mind they were like characters in a movie, people he'd watched Babe know. Maybe sometimes they felt closer than that, like people that he personally had known, but he could never quite get himself to mentally consider them his own friends. They were Babe's friends, and Jamie was just helping out.

But to refer to something as integral to Babe's war experience as Bastogne as his own, as something he'd done and lived through himself...that was a level of acceptance that Jamie wasn't sure he could ever reach. That would require not just acknowledging that he was Babe in a past life, which Jamie was still struggling to do on a regular basis, but embracing the idea that he as Jamie was simply a modern iteration of Babe, a soldier who had froze and fought and lost his friends in the Belgian woods.

Jamie wasn't a soldier. Jamie barely qualified as a grown adult. He knew, objectively, that Babe was just as young as him during the war, but it felt different. He hadn't grown up with it. The most mature he got was being the one to remember to make a grocery list.

He didn't feel like Babe. Babe felt like a person who shared his face and his memories and maybe his head, but Babe didn't feel like _him_. So when he saw these moments of Bill in Mike, this apparent seamless transition between his two friends who really were supposed to be the same...well, it was unnerving.

"Hey, you doing okay, kid?"

Jamie shook himself and looked up from where he'd been scrutinizing his bag with unseeing eyes. Mike was still sitting on his bed, twisted to look at Jamie with that stiff-jawed frown that he only got when he was concerned.

"Huh? Yeah, of course. I was just...thinking."

Mike shook his head and started rifling through his own bag. "Yeah, well don't try it too hard. Can't have what little brains you got melting down on me now."

It wasn't hard to guess what Mike was doing, but Jamie appreciated the easy distraction all the same.

"Okay, if you're the genius here-"

"I am, thank you very much."

"-then where exactly are we going tomorrow that's going to be such a prime place to find people?"

Mike finally unearthed what he had been searching for in his bag, looking entirely too pleased with himself, and tossed it at Jamie. A fistful of slightly crumpled brochures smacked against his chest before sliding to the bed.

"We're gonna play tourists in the worst city in the country, Jamie-boy...except only pick out the cheap ones because I don't have that much cash with me."

Jamie sighed. This, at least, was an extremely Mike thing to do.

And in pure Mike fashion, the places they ended up going were not always quite as advertised.

For example, their first stop on Sunday morning was to a section of Pittsburgh that all of the brochures had called "a new and exciting cultural landmark" and "a popular hotspot for both tourists and locals": Lawrenceville.

It only took one street lined with fixed-gear bicycles and people with too-big glasses and ironic sweaters for Mike to try to enact an extremely-illegal u-turn in the middle of gridlocked traffic.

"No! Nope! Not doing it!"

"I'm actually with you on that one." Jamie snuck a nervous glance out the window, unsure if he was more bothered by the number of stupid hats in his immediate sightline or the way the taxi driver next to him looked about ready to get out of his car and murder everybody in front of him.

"I should have known as soon as they used the word 'revitalized,'" Mike hissed, sounding disappointed in himself.

Jamie shook his head. "'Art hub.'"

"'Trendy coffee shops.'"

"' _Vibrant_.'"

They summarily decided that any friend of theirs, just like at the bars in Philly, would not be caught dead in a place like Lawrenceville, and moved onto their next search-ground.

The Strip District, at least, was somewhat less hipster-y, though Mile lamented that it was disappointingly devoid of strippers despite what its name suggested. There were definitely people around, though, so after endless, curse-filled circling they found a place they could park and took a look around.

Well, Jamie tried to look. Mike was too busy glaring at everything with his teeth slightly bared, looking ready to growl at any moment.

"The market thing isn't so bad," Jamie hedged.

He could feel Mike's glare without seeing it. "Don't approve of anything you see here. That's sacrilege. Sister Mary Francis would be so ashamed of you."

"Look man, you're the one who said we should come here-"

"That doesn't mean I have to _like_ it." Mike grimaced, his lips thinning as he gritted his teeth. "I'm doing this for them."

If Jamie rolled his eyes any harder he'd probably strain something.

"You're such a martyr, that's right. Come on, if we're here, we may as well actually look around."

They spent some time wandering around, being completely unsubtle about how they were staring at everybody who passed them. They found that dumb sandwich shop that everybody in Pittsburgh thought was the most amazing place in the world and hissed at its sign advertising the _real_ cheese steak. There was also a Heinz museum that was disappointingly _not_ dedicated solely to ketchup, but the brochures insisted they go there, and they reasoned that if one of their guys was in town as a tourist, he might go someplace like that. (They were mostly in it for the ketchup.)

But in all of the places they visited, the bars they ducked through (because they were _working_ ), the parks they wandered, they didn't see a single face they knew, a person they recognized just from their posture or gait.

It was nearing five o'clock, around when they had planned to start their trip back to Philly if they wanted Mike to get to work on time in the morning, when Babe said, "I think we're gonna have to call this one a bust, Mr. Genius."

Mike was working his jaw, eyes narrowed in a look of stern concentration as he stared aimlessly at people walking by. "Not yet."

It wasn't even worth rolling his eyes this time. "Look, at this rate we'd already be getting home late, but the longer we wait, the later we're getting in. Unless we have a miracle right about now, we have to admit that this time the plan didn't work, and we'll go home and try to start planning something else-"

Mike held a hand up. "Just give me a minute, okay?"

Jamie wanted to push, to bitch about how much time and money they'd wasted on Mike's harebrained excuses for legitimate ideas and about how they had to do it in _Pittsburgh_ of all places, but there was an unusually serious look in Mike's eyes that gave him pause.

After a long moment of deliberation, Mike said, "I think we should keep going."

"...I don't understand. You want to keep going home?"

He received a frustrated headshake for his troubles. "No, I mean – I think we should keep going, keep looking for guys. But not here. Maybe – we must have picked the wrong city, I think we should go further."

"The _fuck_ do you want to do? Are you actually crazy this time?" He walked in front of Mike so he could look at him head-on. "We've spent two days here and all we've learned is that it's completely fucking impossible to find one person in a city where you don't even know they live. We don't have any goddamn clue where to look for somebody and there's no way we're going to get anything done in a year, not like this. And you want to just try it again somewhere else?"

"Just let me try this-"

It was obvious that Mike was frustrated, jaw tensed and eyes blazing, but Jamie was fed up enough not to care.

"I let you try _this_! Your ideas are why we're even here in the first place! I follow you through a lot of stupid shit, but come on, even I have my limits. This is insane. We're gonna go home, and we'll figure something better out, and-"

"Babe, will you just listen to me?"

The name was enough to choke Jamie on his words, running into each other until they knotted up in his throat. Mike's expression softened for a moment, eyes widening in surprise at his own words. He opened his mouth as if to say something, and then shook his head. "Jamie," he said more quietly, putting gentle emphasis on the name, "I know you put up with a lot of my shit, and you went along with me when I wanted to do this. Just this one last time, can you go with me for this? I know it's stupid and we need a better plan but like – I just got this feeling, y'know? We're supposed to be doing something on this trip, I think we can find someone, we just gotta keep going."

"What makes you so sure?" Jamie's own words were quiet, solemn. "How do you know?"

Mike shook his head, ducking to run a hand through his hair. When he looked up, his gaze was fervent and his words swift.

"Look, you know how-" He took a step closer, lowering his voice so anybody who hadn't already been warned off by their argument on a public sidewalk couldn't hear them. "You know how back – back _then_ , you'd get that _feeling_ , you know, like you just knew something was going to happen. You could feel it in the air, how everything got still right before shells came in? Or how you could see someone's shadow and you don't know how you really knew who it was but you just _knew_? That's how I feel right now. I know that _something's_ gonna happen, but I just got this feeling that if we go home now, we're gonna miss it."

Jamie blinked. He wasn't sure if it was the appeal to his past that he didn't want to touch with a ten foot pole or his inability to ever turn Mike down, especially when he was sincere about something, but as with every dumb decision he'd ever made in his life, something in him wanted to follow Mike to hell and back, just because he'd said it was a good idea.

A little longer couldn't hurt.

"One day," he said, holding up a finger in front of Mike's face before he could interrupt, "Just one more day, and then we head straight home, because we _cannot_ afford to keep skipping work like this, and before we start trying to do anything again we are coming up with a real plan with real reasons to go places and-"

He was frozen into silence when Mike grabbed him by the back of his neck and hauled him in for a warm, firm hug, squeezing tight before pulling back and holding Jamie by his shoulders. His bright smile made it impossible for Jamie not to at least smile weakly in response.

"Thank you, Jamie, seriously. I promise you, this is gonna work out, I can feel it. And we'll have a real plan next time, no more throwing darts and shit."

Except they had to throw darts just one more time, it appeared, because Mike had no idea where he wanted to go other than further west on I-70. The next major city on the interstate was Columbus, Ohio, which seemed to be enough to satisfy whatever strange feelings Mike had had when they rolled into town around nine at night and settled into a motel that seemed to be the twin of the one they stayed at in Pittsburgh.

"Same stains and everything, I swear!" Mike said.

Jamie just shook his head.

They didn't really know anything about Columbus, other than that the Blue Jackets played there, so it must have been full of patient, long-suffering people. But seeing as that knowledge gave them absolutely zero information on where they should start looking wandering the city aimlessly, this time without the aid of brochures.

The similarity to the previous day was too depressing to acknowledge.

It was too early to search bars, and at that point bars just made Jamie think of how many shifts he'd have to pick up to appease his boss after all of these disappearing acts, so they spent the morning searching a mall and a large park. Shortly after noon Mike insisted that he had a craving for Mexican food that could not be denied, so somehow, in the soap opera that was Jamie's life, they found themselves in line at a Chipotle. It happened to be right near Nationwide Arena, which was pretty cool, but that still didn't change the fact that Jamie hadn't travelled all the way to Columbus to eat burritos while staring at a closed building.

Mike sighed mid-chew, showing off way more than anyone ever wanted to see. "I know, okay?"

Jamie hadn't actually said anything, but apparently he didn't need to for Mike to read his mind anyway.

"I'm just trying to..." Mike took another bite of his burrito and then waved it in thought. "Soon, y'know? I think we're close."

"Close to what, indigestion?"

"Shut the fuck up, I'm serious. This won't be totally useless, and not just because I got a burrito out of it. I swear, any second now- ho-ly shit, Jamie, Jamie-cakes, I'm a genius, holy shit." He snatched at Jamie's wrist, smearing grease on the grey long-sleeved shirt he was once again wearing to cover his arm (and hadn't long sleeves all week in June been fun).

Jamie tried to pull his arm away, making a face and griping, "What the fuck is wrong with you Mikey, I-"

Mike released his wrist so he could use his hands to turn Jamie's head to his right.

"...oh."

Mike was going to be so insufferable.

A group of guys in polo shirts and khakis had just walked in and got in line to order, looking for all the world like a convention of cell phone salesmen had just gone on recess for lunch. There was a shorter guy among them with a toothy grin, waving his hands emphatically and going on and on about some computer he was fixing up at home and how great it was going to be, and...

"Fuck me, is that Hoobler?"

Mike patted Jamie's cheek, neither tearing their eyes away from the line at the front counter.

In a voice so smug he should have been choking on it, Mike said, "You bet your scrawny ginger ass it is, buttercup."

Jamie glanced back at him, and then back at Hoobler, afraid that if he looked away for too long the man would be gone. "He's with friends, so we should try to be quick, right? Like, quick and inconspicuous? Bump into him maybe?"

There was a glint of something old in Mike's eyes, old and mischievous and very, very Wild Bill Guarnere. Maybe it was because Hoobler was here and everything in Jamie's head felt a little out of step with time, but this time, he didn't mind it so much.

"Nah," Mike said, "I have an idea. C'mon." He shoved the rest of his burrito into his mouth and started gathering up his trash; Jamie, at a loss, did the same. On their way to the exit, Mike diverted over to the group who was still a few places back in line. Before Jamie could do anything, Mike was saying, "Hi, I'm doing a survey and I wanted to know about your thoughts on gun safety."

"Jesus Christ," Jamie hissed through his teeth, hustling over to Mike's side in hopes of defusing what could become a situation. Mike hadn't even given the guys a chance to answer before he pointed to Hoobler and said, "You, what do you think? You into guns?"

Hoobs frowned, face twisting up in confusion. "No? I actually-"

"You got a thing for collecting guns? Old German Lugers, maybe?"

Now Hoobler was just staring at Mike, and his friends were glancing around hesitantly as if hoping inanely that the staff would come help them get rid of the crazy guy, which was adorable because there was no way that fast food employees wanted to deal with more crazy people than they were personally forced to interact with.

But Hoobs, bless him, said, "I'm anti-gun altogether. Actually, I think we need greater legislation-"

"Oh thank Christ." Mike sighed in unison with Jamie. "Stay away from guns, kid, they ain't any good for you."

"I don't think you're older than me-"

Mike ignored him, continuing with some more accusatory pointing, "Lugers especially, they ain't worth it."

"Nobody likes Lugers," Jamie added for good measure.

"Actually," said one of the guys standing behind Hoobler, "My grandfather had a Luger he got back in the Second World War, and it was really cool to-"

"Shut the hell up, buddy, nobody cares." Mike steamrolled right over him, continuing to Hoobler, "Don't collect weapons, it's expensive and stupid and you will die."

Hoobler shook his head, face beyond confused. "What the hell?"

"It's just not worth it man," Jamie said, shaking his head. Playing along with Mike's attitude, he grabbed Hoobler's hand between both of his own, saying, "It was really great to meet you. Stay safe, don't play with guns. Tag. You have a good day now!"

He grabbed Mike's shoulder and shoved him towards the door, Mike shouting back, "And no collecting knives either!" as they went. They speed-walked out the door and down the street, doing their best to get lost in the crowd and the traffic, leaving Hoobler and his friends staring in a confused stupor.

Mike took a sip from the drink he'd managed to hold onto throughout the whole thing and held up his other hand to Jamie.

"We were inconspicuous as _fuck_ , man!"

They high-fived.

Jamie pulled back his sleeve as they walked, just in time to see the red "Donald Hoobler" fill in with black.

"We're good," he sighed in relief, unable to keep from smiling.

Mike whooped loudly, uncaring that they were crossing a street surrounded by pedestrians. "I'm tellin' you man, we got this thing. We're a little shaky, but we got this. Two in like a week? We'll get this shit done in no time."

"Oh yeah?" With Mike that excited, it was difficult not to feel like everything would work out. Jamie knew it wouldn't last – he was going to have to burst Mike's bubble later – but for now, he could let Mike have this.

Mike's smile was worth it.

"Man, Easy Company won't know what hit 'em."

~~~

Nick Johansson took the stairs to his apartment two at a time, too impatient to wait for the elevator. It was all he could do to calm down and get his keys into the lock long enough to get through his front door. Once he was in he slammed the door behind him, toed off his loafers and made directly for his couch, dumping his messenger bag on the floor next to him and grabbing for his laptop. He waited impatiently for it to warm up; it was fast – he'd bought all the parts himself, and tech was the one thing he let himself splurge on, so he knew it was fast, but even that wasn't enough for him today.

The mark had shown up on his palm at lunch. The entire trip had been strange, honestly. First Nick and his friends had been accosted by some weird guys going on about guns when they were waiting in line, and then as he was eating, Nick had noticed the mark on his palm – a red spade about three inches high, perfectly defined in shape in a way that birthmarks never were. He'd spent at least five minutes trying to scrub it off in the bathroom at the restaurant, and then longer at work when it still showed no hint of fading.

He'd thought about showing it to his friends, asking what they thought, but there was something about it that made him want to hold his tongue. It felt...he didn't want to go as far as saying personal, but private. It didn't feel like something he should share, or at least, not with the guys from work.

But the internet had always been Nick's greatest confidante, long before he became an IT specialist for the United States government.

He googled "red spade mark on palm" and hit enter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to give a huge thanks to my buddy who lives near Pittsburgh for being such a champ, because I told him I was writing a fic where two guys from Philly were going to Pittsburgh and that the whole thing would be just the two of them insulting Pittsburgh and he just responded by telling me he was proud and giving me fic fodder and travel info, so a million thanks to him. And I'd also like to take a moment to let all of my readers know that the opinions given about Pittsburgh and any city discussed in this story are written in jest and I don't mean to offend anybody with them.
> 
> This is also a good place to mention, if I haven't yet, that I will be extremely unfamiliar with most locations in this story and will be working off of extensive google maps and travel website usage, so I apologize for any geographic or location-related inaccuracies. I'd love to have been to all of these places, but alas, I have not, so unless I have somebody give me info on a city I'm flying blind.
> 
>  
> 
> [Map](https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1759631#)


	7. Everyone Could Use a Little Bit of Magic, or How Bill Makes Babe a Believer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guys figure out a plan. Well, sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I shockingly have very little to say, other than that as per usual, nothing here has been edited or beta'd. Oh, and this is my shortest time between posting chapters, ever. _Six days._ Sadly, don't expect that to become the norm.

The problem with Mike's crazy-ass bullshit shot-in-the-dark mess of a plan working out was that he was never going to stop gloating about it. Especially not after he'd had two such plans work out in a short span of time.

(He was, of course, ignoring the Pittsburgh failure as an incidental side-trip on the way to his real success in Columbus.)

Mike gloating wasn't anything unusual for Jamie; Mike had been a sore winner since he beat Jamie at Candy Land when they were toddlers (he was also a notorious cheater, but that was apparently irrelevant). Rather, the real issue was that Jamie then had to disabuse him of the notion that he was the greatest strategist to ever walk the earth.

Naturally, Mike was still crowing about it when he got home from work Tuesday afternoon, in the brief time interim between when Mike's shift ended and Jamie's began.

"Do you wanna know what my boss said to me today? He told me that if I was going to show up in such a great mood, I should take unexpected days off more often. You see that? I even got _customer compliments_ for my sunshiny disposition."

"I'm sure you did-"

"I am a treasure for the company, James." Mike came over and put his hands on Jamie's shoulders, leaning close and looking him directly in the eye. "An absolute fucking _treasure_."

Making sure as much disgust as possible was showing on his face, Jamie carefully pushed Mike away with a hand to his forehead, saying, "Yeah, I'm real sure you are. And don't call me James."

"Don't hate the player, _James_ , hate the game." Mike paused in thought, and then added, "Actually, yeah, you should hate the game, the game is what got us in this mess to begin with. But don't worry, because _I_ am going to get us out of it!"

Jamie crossed his arms and grimaced. "Yeah, about that. We gotta have a talk."

The squint Mike sent his way was considering. "Are you breaking up with me, or just announcing that you're pregnant?"

"What – no, _Jesus Christ_ , can you not be serious about something for once in your life?"

Mike smirked and reached out to mess with Jamie's hair on the way to the fridge. His voice echoed from the small confines of the fridge as he dug around in it, saying, "Okay, I'm listening. What is it?"

He emerged with a beer in hand and another smug smile on his face.

Jamie wasn't quite as amused.

"We need a plan," he said, leaning back against the island countertop. "A real plan on how we're gonna do this thing with more behind it than your intuition or a fucking dart game or whatever."

"Ah, but!" Mike held up a finger, stupid smile still firmly in place. "My system worked."

"Yeah, but it could have easily failed miserably and then what? We'd have missed work for nothing and we'd have blown a shit-ton of cash on hotels and gas money and food just to tour a couple of cities we don't even care about. We can't keep doing this. You said so yourself back in Pittsburgh that we'd make a plan."

"But that was before we knew that my way _worked-_ "

"It was a guess!" Jamie shoved himself away from the counter and began pacing a tight path back and forth in front of it, tugging at his too-warm long sleeves as he did. "It was a guess, and good guess or not, we have no guarantee that it would ever work out like that again. We don't know what made it work, if it was like, fairy magic or some shit like that, but right now, it was just sheer dumb luck that you picked Columbus. It could have been Cleveland or Cincinnati or fucking Springfield or something, and then where would we be? Screwed over and kicking ourselves for wasting so much time."

Mike shrugged easily and took a long drink from his beer, entirely unfazed by Jamie's agitation. He leaned against the counter and rolled the bottle back and forth between his hands, watching Jamie pace like that one sad polar bear at the zoo.

"Y'know," he said softly, "I think it might actually be something like fate. 'Cause I mean, my intuition is crazy good, but that one was a stretch even for me. I think..." He glanced down and picked at the label on the bottle, uncharacteristically bashful in a way that even Jamie rarely got to see. "I think that someone, or something, wanted us to find Hoobs. We were supposed to find him."

Jamie finally slowed in his pacing, drawn in by the quiet conviction in Mike's voice. He propped himself on his elbows on the opposite side of the counter from Mike, leaning in to catch his eye.

"You think this was Carnie?"

Mike got half way through a shrug before he stopped and shook his head. "Maybe, but...I don't know, man, I don't think so. Why would he want to help us?"

Now it was Jamie's turn to shrug, eyes on Mike's hands as he ripped off little pieces of the label and made a pile on the countertop. "Maybe just to mess with us? Get us hopeful early on so he can crush our spirits later?"

"Maybe. But...the feeling I had, it didn't feel the way his, his magical shit did. That freezing thing he did..." Here Mike grimaced, looking as if he was suppressing a shudder. Jamie wasn't too particularly fond of those memories either. "That all felt...heavy. Malicious and shit. He wanted you to know he was fucking you up. And this just felt...I don't know. Natural. It was just insistent that there was something important further west, and it would be a really great idea if we went there. Not even a good idea just like...the _right_ idea, and doing anything else would be a mistake."

Jamie eyed him carefully. "I don't know, man. That sounds a lot like something that a manipulative sadistic fairy would pull if he wanted to make you play into his traps."

The look Mike gave him in return was just as shrewd. "I know what it sounds like, but you just gotta trust me that whatever this weird thing is, I don't think it's me, and I don't think it's Carnie."

"It's not even like something from...before?"

It was Jamie's first real time verbally acknowledging their disparate timelines of his own volition. The words were awkward in his mouth.

Mike shrugged, not seeming to catch the importance – but then, he wouldn't, when Bill appeared to be just another era of his life to him. "Nah. I mean, like I said before, I had those feelings back then, but pretty much anyone who'd been on the line for more than a week caught on to shit like that. You just knew that something big was on the way. This was like...more direct? When we hit Columbus I knew that had to be it, and all of a sudden I just _knew_ we had to get Mexican food in that specific area – it was too much just to be a gut feeling man. I'm good, but even I'm not that good."

"It's hard for you to say that, isn't it."

Mike heaved the sigh of somebody who had just run six miles, possibly up and down a mountain. "Oh my God, it really is."

"Well." Jamie stood up straight and reached across the counter to pat Mike's shoulder. "I'd say that for now we just gotta be wary of it, just in case, because if you're right...well, God knows we can't trust most of this shit anyway. I gotta go or I'm gonna be late." He started off towards his bedroom to grab his wallet. "You spend some time looking for some better ideas, though. And let me know if you have any more of those 'feelings!'"

But Mike didn't have any more feelings that night, or the night after that, and days went by without either one of them being able to come up with a better plan for how to proceed. The worst part was that they were entirely on their own, because "how to look up your old reincarnated buddies with nothing but a picture in your head of what they look like" wasn't exactly something you could ask your friends about or research on the internet. Well, not if you wanted useful results, at least. (The internet had some concerning ideas, though.)

Jamie didn't fare as well at his own work as Mike had. His manager, who also happened to own the bar, was concerned with his sudden bout of last-minute call-offs, and even when Jamie rushed to assure him that everything was fine, really, those were just isolated incidents and not the start of a new pattern, he still caught John sending him odd glances throughout his shifts.

"You're sure you're okay?" he asked on Friday night, four days since their trip to Columbus. "You just seem like you've been...distracted."

John was a good guy. He'd always treated Jamie and his other employees well and stood up for them when customers were being awful. He was a fair boss, one who cared about his people's wellbeing.

Jamie felt guilty lying to him.

"Yeah, of course! Sorry, don't know what that's about. Just a little tired is all, I guess."

That wasn't entirely untrue. He was finding it nearly impossible to sleep lately. If he wasn't kept up worrying about his impending expiration date and how he was never going to be able to forestall it, then he was falling asleep only to wake up twisted in sweaty sheets with visions of somebody else's life still flashing in his head, and that only made him more reluctant to fall back asleep.

But he also figured that if he was going to die, he may as well not waste what time he had left sleeping – or at least, that's what he tried to tell Mike when Mike found him camped out on the couch at four in the morning, huddled in a blanket and staring blankly at a dark television.

Mike had paused in the doorway of his room, watching Jamie with an unreadable expression. He frowned and shook his head.

"Aw, kid," he sighed, coming over and settling on the couch next to Jamie, wrapping a strong arm around Jamie's blanket-covered shoulders and pulling him in tight against his side. "You can't keep doing this."

Jamie had a flash, just for a moment, of two men pressing him between them in a tarp-covered foxhole, holding him close as he shivered and stared through a frozen night, unable to stop the constant replay of John Julian's death and his own failures behind his eyes.

He shuddered and pressed closer to Mike's side.

"I'm fine," he mumbled, his temple coming to rest on Mike's shoulder.

He could feel Mike shake his head.

"Don't you pull that shit with me, we both know that ain't true. Look, we'll figure it out together, okay? But you staying up all night doing this to yourself, that ain't helping anybody."

"It's not like I want to," Jamie whispered, his voice hoarse and cracking, eyes still staring fixedly ahead despite the burning building up behind them. "I can't – I can't help it. Every time I close my eyes I swear it's like I never left, and I can't stop it. Everybody's screaming at me and the Germans are shooting at us, and Julian's looking at me and Christ, Bill, there's so much blood, he's choking on it and he's always _staring_ at me, waiting for me to come help him, because I'm supposed to look out for him and get his stuff back to his ma, and then I just fucking _leave_ him there-"

His gasp was a wet, shuddering thing, his tears unnoticed until he tasted them on his lips. "I can't – every night, if I get to sleep after spending forever thinking about how fucked I am, that's always waiting for me, every single night. If it's not Julian then it's somebody else, bleeding out and I'm just fucking sitting there watching them die. Mike – _Bill_ – you got your – you and Toye, you...how do you not dream about that?"

He could feel Mike's chin digging into the top of his head, his hand tight around Jamie's arm. This wasn't their thing – this wasn't _Mike's_ thing, or Bill's – but Mike was trying anyway.

Softly he said, "I do. It's not...it hasn't been every night, but it's happened. I wake up when I look down and realize that...that it's gone. I don't know how to make it stop. I guess it just..."

Jamie could hear him swallow, and then his voice went even quieter.

"I guess it's not as bad, for me, because I know that I'm okay right now, and...and I know things were good, after the war. I know that I still had a good life even after what happened. I was happy. But guys like Julian...that doesn't get better, ever."

It took Jamie a moment to realize that the quiet, broken sound came from him; he only figured it out when Mike rubbed his arm soothingly.

"That doesn't mean you gotta be staying up every night trying not to think about it. It just means...well, maybe you gotta look at it like my leg, right? Back then, I lost my leg – now, I got it back. Back then, guys like Julian were out in a war in the middle of the fucking forest in the winter with no supplies or back-up, and now they aren't. You gotta think about it like that, that we got a new start this time where all that shit didn't happen. They're okay this time. And Julian, wherever the fuck he is right now, wouldn't want you to be up all night thinking about what happened to him last time when your ass should be sleeping so you can work on finding him this time. Y'know? We're back now, and everything's gonna be better this time."

Jamie was so tempted to ask Mike in that moment if they really were back – _they_ , Bill and Babe, if Bill had really just woken up seventy years later to find that he'd lived the past twenty-one years as Mike. He wanted to ask how Mike was able to make _that_ transition so easily, to be able to look back at a life like Bill's, a life of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes into wars and losing his fucking leg, and to call that his own and not feel like he was losing something of Mike by gaining something of Bill.

But he was so caught up in his gratitude, in that heavy twist of emotions weighing on his chest, so full of affection and thanks and sheer relief that he was allowed to have Bill to help him through this, that he didn't bring it up. Instead, he only whispered roughly, "Thank you. I can't...just, thanks."

Despite his verbosity, Mike had never been one to need words in return; sometimes it even made him uncomfortable. And so to Jamie's continued relief he simply nodded, jaw bumping the top of Jamie's head, and said, "Always, kid. Always."

Jamie slept a little better the next few nights. The nightmares didn't disappear, but sometimes during them, he was able to remember that he wasn't always Babe: that now, he was Jamie, and he had a chance to fix this, to keep these scenes from repeating themselves in a modern setting. And that helped. For once, being Jamie and not just Babe was turning out to be a good thing.

The anxieties weren't going away, though. Jamie didn't have the same brash optimism that Mike did, that Bill did. Babe had, or at least he had at the start of the war, full of the same cocky self-assuredness as so many of the men who went off to fight a war without understanding what it entailed. Babe would have been able to tell himself that he'd make it all work out because he had no reason to believe that it wouldn't.

But Jamie had grown up always wanting proof for everything. He wanted the logic behind it, the reasoning. "Just because" had stopped being an acceptable answer to him at an early age.

Mike had always been his blind spot, the one who made him forget about his misgivings and just believe in things for the fun of it, because sometimes it was okay not to know. Mike was the one who whispered rebuttals to him when they were five and his oldest sister Lauren started listing reasons why there couldn't be a Santa Claus. Mike was the one who could look at a box and tell Jamie it was a spaceship and make him go along with it, and ten minutes later when that box was a racecar, Jamie would believe it too, because Mike said so, and when Mike said it, it kind of did look like a racecar.

In a lot of ways, Mike was Jamie's positive outlook on life. It was just that as he got older, it became harder and harder to believe in something just because Mike said he should, no matter how much he tried. And so it was extremely difficult to assure himself that everything would work out when a week had past since they found Hoobler in Columbus and they still didn't have even the vaguest of ideas about how to proceed.

Jamie had an opening shift that day, coming in at ten in the morning to cover the set up and the lunch crowds, so he was able to escape a little after eight that night. (Mike was always telling him to get a job with better hours, but Jamie always told him to find a job with better tips and he'd do it.) When he got home, Mike was sitting on the couch, an open box of pizza on the coffee table with a book lying next to it.

With a start, Jamie realized that it was the book that Madame Doyle had given them. The one that had started this whole mess.

"I got pizza," was how Mike greeted him, never once looking up from the book. Given Mike's track record with wiping his hands, Jamie was kind of afraid to see what new and interesting stains it had.

"I can see that. I can also see that you're...reading."

Not that much reading could be done, Jamie noticed as he glanced over Mike's shoulder, because just like the first time they had looked through the book, the pages all seemed to be either blank or written in some language Jamie could never hope to understand, interspersed with some swirling, unidentifiable pictures with illegible captions.

But Mike had that smug aura about him as he flipped back to a different page he had marked with a piece of junk mail advertising a home security system.

"I can't find that one we used last time," he said, "The one for lost things. But I found this!"

He pointed to the page. _For a Little Subtlety_ , the title said. The rest of the page was full of the same characteristic gibberish as the last time, complete with the requisite phonetic pronunciation underneath each line.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Jamie asked, slumping down next to him on the couch and grabbing a piece of pizza.

Mike shrugged. "I have no idea, but I could read it, so that was better than most of this shit. But I figured, if we've still got this thing, and one of those spells turned out to do something last time, it couldn't hurt to try another one, right?"

Jamie stared at him blankly and chewed.

"You do remember what happened last time, right? We were both there for the same thing? I carved forty names into my arm with a fucking _knife_ and we got fucked over by some sort of mystical fairy thing. I wouldn't call that something I'd like to try again any time soon."

"Well, yeah, but after that happened, what's the worst that it could do?"

Jamie blinked at him and took another bite.

"...Okay, so yeah, things could go bad, but look, this is the only thing we've come up with in a week, and I think it's worth a shot. You wanted me to tell you when I had weird feelings about things, right? Well I've got a lot of bells going off in my head right now saying that this is what we should be doing. I've been thinking we should check out the book all day, and when I got home it was the only thing on my mind. I think something wants us to try this."

"Carnie, probably," Jamie grumbled, but Mike was shaking his head.

"No, I told you, it's not him. I don't know what it is, but...I mean, we don't have any better ideas, and I really don't think it could hurt to try."

There were plenty of warning bells going off in Jamie's head too, telling him about all of the ways that this could go horribly, atrociously wrong, just like last time, but then there was the part of him that was Babe in his head too, who felt that last time, something had also gone a little bit right.

And Jamie had always been prone to believing in Mike's ideas.

"Alright, fine. Let me go take a piss first."

He was grateful that Mike didn't try to high-five him on the way to the bathroom, but he was likely just barely restraining himself.

In the end, the second spell was just as anticlimactic as the first one, except maybe even more so, because absolutely jack-shit happened.

"Maybe it's just... _too_ subtle," Mike said after they spent ten minutes cautiously creeping around the apartment looking for a change.

"Or maybe it actually didn't do anything." Jamie couldn't decide if he was relieved or not. On one hand, they hadn't died, but on the other, they were still just as screwed as before.

Mike sat back down on the couch with a frown. "Maybe you read it wrong."

"Oh, I read the pretend words wrong? Okay, then _you_ try to read it."

"I can't."

"Of course, because I'm the only special snowflake who can do _any_ of this shit, because I'm the _chosen one-_ "

"No, you dick, I mean that the entire fucking page is gone."

That was enough to stop Jamie in his near-habitual pacing. When he came back to the table, he saw that Mike was right: the entire page had gone blank.

"You couldn't have accidentally flipped the page, could you? Like, maybe if we walked past it too fast and the breeze turned it-"

Mike was rapidly flipping pages, his frown increasing with every unintelligible title he scanned. "No, man, we weren't anywhere near the table. And besides that, I can't fucking find it. It's like with the first one, it's just gone. That can't be right, how can a page just disappear like that?"

Jamie sat down heavily next to him. "I mean, I guess it is supposed to be like, a magic book or whatever."

"Well I'm getting real sick of this magic shit, then. Oh hey, here's something."

He nudged Jamie and pointed to the new page. It wasn't one that they'd seen before, but it at least had a title that they could read: _For Some Help Getting Started._

"Where the hell was this earlier?" Mike groused.

" _Magic_."

"Oh, shut the fuck up. Okay, so what about this? Do we want to do this?"

"Do we have much of a choice?"

It frustrated him, how obvious it was that they were being led by someone, by some _thing_ , to some sort of planned conclusion, but Mike had been right earlier: they didn't have any better options right now.

He paid closer attention to the phonetics this time, just in case Mike was right and he'd somehow screwed up the pronunciation with the last one. But when he finished reading, they were once again treated to a rather disappointing lack of a result.

They sat back and looked around the room. Nothing felt any different. Jamie still felt like himself, or whatever mixed up version of himself he'd been for the past two weeks now, and Mike looked the same. The pizza was still congealing on the table, and the book...

The book had gone blank.

"Aw, shit. Not again."

Mike was muttering furious curses to the book about its parentage (or when that failed, the parentage of the bookmaker, and its purportedly shoddy binding and inability to hold a page for more than ten seconds), tearing through the pages with enough speed that Jamie was surprised he didn't rip them.

For his part, Jamie slumped back into the couch, groping blindly for the remote. The tv came to life with the local news.

"And we're going to jump to a feed from our sister station in New York City for the conference," the newswoman was saying, just as the screen flipped to a shot of a man in a police officer's uniform standing at a podium, flanked by other men and women in suits and police uniforms. With a start, Jamie noticed the headline at the bottom of the screen.

_Eleven Found Dead in Mafia Shootout._

"Shit," Mike hissed, whistling through his teeth. "When did that happen?"

"Today, I guess," Jamie murmured.

The man at the podium, the police commissioner, was reporting that as far as they knew, no civilians had been harmed in what was being treated as a deadly confrontation between two rival criminal organizations.

"Is the mafia even still a thing?" Jamie asked.

Mike shrugged. "Beats me, man. I thought it was only in movies too."

"We have not yet identified all of the victims in this shooting," the commissioner was saying, "and cannot at this time rule it solely as an altercation between combatants of two rival organizations, but we will do everything in our power to investigate this matter and ensure that this type of event does not happen again."

The cameraman zoomed out, showing the large array of people huddled around the commissioner, the stark white floodlights washing out their faces and making them look a sickly pale against their dark uniforms.

It was a pale face at the very far left of the screen that caught Jamie's eye.

"Oh my God," he breathed, feeling his jaw drop of its own accord. He elbowed Mike and then pointed at the edge of the screen, never moving his eyes. "I think...I think the spell might've worked."

Because standing there at the edge of the media scrum, eyebrows pinched and mouth turned down into a frown, was a man in an officer's uniform. When the female officer in front of him shifted to the side, a flash of a name patch was visible on the front of his jacket.

 _Frost_.

Officer Frost looked a hell of a lot like one C. Carwood Lipton.

Mike cleared his throat loudly.

"Well," he said, "I always wanted to go to New York City."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've recently decided to make an HBO war fandom sideblog, so if you guys ever want to talk to me about this fic or any others, or if you just want to see copious reblogged gifsets, you can do that over [here](https://armypeaches.tumblr.com)!
> 
>  
> 
> [Map](https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1759631#)


	8. Sharing Sensitive Information, or How Babe Almost Gets Arrested

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys travel to New York City and get in a little over their heads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today (yesterday?) was my birthday, and so this is my gift to all of you: a new chapter, very late, half of which was written on a road trip and none of which was edited. But I am very excited for the next chapter, so yay?

"One day." Jamie brandished a finger in front of Mike's face, staring at him intently. The police commissioner was still taking questions on the tv, but neither of them was paying attention to him anymore.

"We are fitting this trip into _one day_ , Michael, and if we fuck it all up and don't tag Lip, then we go back home and at least we know where he is, and we try again some other time. I have tomorrow off, but I absolutely cannot miss another day of work this soon so we have to be back in time for me to get to work Wednesday. That's like four hours of driving tomorrow. That means we're going to go to bed and get up at the ass-crack of dawn to get on the road and spend the whole day harassing police officers until we find one that looks like Lip, and then we are going home at a reasonable time so that I can go to work in the morning, and we are _not_ getting fucking arrested, do you understand me Michael?"

Mike blinked at him slowly, once, twice.

"You're sexy when you take charge like that."

"Oh _fuck you!_ " Jamie turned on his heel and started for his bedroom.

Mike's cackle followed him. "No, really, that was good, you've got my heart all aflutter and everything!"

"Go the fuck to bed, Michael!"

His closed door didn't stop him from hearing Mike's " _Oh_ , call me _Michael_ again!"

It was probably a good thing that they were going to find Lip, because Jamie could have really used his signature disappointed First Sergeant expression right about then.

~~~

The trip to New York City itself wasn't so bad, mostly because Mike was too tired to be that much of a jackass to Jamie when all of his efforts were spent cursing other drivers, the sun, and the idea of morning in general. Jamie, therefore, was left plenty of time to research just which of New York's twenty million police precincts might contain one Officer Frost, all while trying very hard not to think about how much data he was using.

"He's gotta be connected to that shooting last night or he wouldn't have been at the conference. So either he was involved in responding to the police report or more likely, he's probably investigating it, right? We just have to figure out who would be in charge of investigating mob shootings then."

"Why the fuck is it so fucking bright at eight in the fucking morning? Who the fuck gave you the fucking right?"

"You know," Jamie began in a conversational tone, "With the whole hunched-over-squinting-under-the-visor thing and the yelling at the sun and the underbite, you're really living up to that whole gremlin image."

"You can't even fucking _see_ anything because there's too _much_ fucking light-"

"Yeah, okay, you're super helpful. Anyways, if he's investigating the shooting he'd probably be in like homicide or something, right? Unless he's in some sort of gangs division because they think it's the mob. Shit, this is going to take forever."

Mike scoffed, and it took Jamie a moment to figure out that it was directed at him and not existence in general. "Just call the fucking tip line and tell 'em you know something about the shooting but you'll only talk to Officer Frost about it. You meet him, shake his hand, make up some bullshit and get the hell out of there and we get you home in time to get a good night's sleep. Easy!"

Jamie had been privy to many of Mike's plans over the years. He'd even let a lot of really shitty ideas come to fruition in the name of friendship. Mike was the entire reason why Jamie had released that frog into the wilds of the men's locker room in high school. Jamie put up with a lot of shit for Mike.

But as the lifelong authority on Mike's poor planning, Jamie could also say with confidence that this was quite possibly – no most definitely – the absolute shittiest of batshit ideas that he had ever schemed up.

"It's really hard to go to fucking work when you've been arrested for fucking _lying to the cops_! What the fuck is wrong with you? Did you forget to put your fucking brain on this morning or did you just put it up your ass again on accident? In what world do you see that plan going over well?"

Mike made sure that Jamie knew his scoff was for him this time as he lit a cigarette. "Jesus Christ, calm the fuck down. It's not that big a deal, the cops get bad tips all the time. People looking for attention and reward money, you know the drill. Refuse to tell them what you know until Lip shows up and once he does just tell him that you think you heard gunshots or whatever, something unhelpful, and then they'll let you go."

"Not without getting me to explain _why_ I would only talk to Lip. They'll want answers for that, and it'll be really fucking suspicious if I can't explain myself. And then they'll have all my personal info, because they'll want that before I talk to them, and then when I can't come up with a good explanation for anything they'll fucking _detain me_ and how the fuck will I get to work on time _then_?"

Mike ashed the cigarette out the window and brought it back to his mouth, saying around it, "You know, I'm really glad that you got your priorities all worked out, kid. It's not the _arrested_ part that bothers you, it's the getting to work on time."

"Yeah, well, I spend enough time around you, I figure I'm bound to get arrested at some point."

"Good man." Mike patted his shoulder a little too soundly. "You're embracing your future already."

"That still doesn't mean I'm going to _lie to the fucking cops_. I'm dumb but I'm not that fucking dumb."

~~~

Jamie lied to the fucking cops. If anybody asked him he would say it had a lot to do with secondhand smoke inhalation and too much time spent cramped in a car with Mike while he cursed a blue streak at the entire idea of New York traffic (and the traffic's mother), but somehow Jamie found himself at the world's most decrepit payphone calling a police tip line to insist that he had some sensitive information about their latest and biggest case – and that he could only reveal it if Officer Frost was willing to meet him at a particular bench in Central Park, alone, at 1pm.

It was by far the fucking shadiest thing he'd ever done in his life, and Mike spent the whole time gleefully rocking back and forth on his heels looking like Jamie had just made his life.

"I'm so fucking proud!" he hissed when Jamie covered the receiver to say he'd been put on hold. "Look at my boy, a fucking felon!"

Jamie had to resign himself to only flipping him the bird, because then a new voice came on the phone, gruffer and much angrier sounding than the cool calm of the tip line operator, introducing itself as Lieutenant Hauser and demanding to know why Jamie couldn't come into the precinct and give his statement to another officer.

"Because I, uh, I don't know them."

Silence, and then a low, growled, "And you _know_ Frost?"

"Uh, no, not, uh, not personally, but I, um, saw him on tv at the press conference and he looked like he was, like, really trustworthy?"

Mike was giving him a double thumbs-up, so it seemed like as good a reason as any.

The lieutenant didn't seem to be in agreement with Mike.

"You're telling me that you can't speak to another officer because you don't _trust_ them?"

"I – yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. I only trust Officer Frost. He looked, uh, really sincere. And stuff."

"And stuff."

"Yes, uh, sir."

There was a long silence on the other end, long enough that Jamie thought he'd been put on hold again or maybe they'd just hung up on him. Then Hauser was back, sounding distinctly unamused.

"You're going to have to learn to trust somebody else then, because we don't take _requests_ from people saying they know intimate information about a _mob shooting_ that killed eleven people. So here's what's going to happen: you're going to come into the precinct, you're going to tell the officer at the desk that you have information to report, and then you're going to sit your ass in a chair and an officer of _my personal choosing_ is going to take your statement and maybe while you're there you can explain just why you wanted to meet Frost so badly-"

"I can't do that!" Jamie yelped. He cut a glance at Mike, who was waving his arms in a gesture that could have meant anything from "keep it going" to "I'm still so mad at the sun for existing," and said loudly, "I'm sorry sir but I can only meet with Officer Frost at the, uh, aforementioned bench in Central Park at one o'clock or I can't talk to anybody. Uh, I'm sorry, I have to go now, bye!"

He slammed the phone on Lieutenant Hauser's snarling protests and turned to Mike, fidgeting anxiously with the too-long sleeves of his shirt.

"How do you think that was?"

He jumped when Mike's arms suddenly clamped around him in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet to shake him around a bit.

"That was fucking _beautiful_ , Jamie-cakes. Pure fucking poetry, I'm so fucking proud of you."

People were staring, as people were wont to do when Mike was around just from the sheer ratio of curses to words whenever he opened his mouth, but Mike paid them no mind. He didn't put Jamie down until he patted Mike's arm and said, "Okay buddy, thanks, I'm glad you liked me signing my own arrest warrant. But we've got like forty minutes to get to that bench we scoped out, so we should probably get over there in case Lip magically does show up."

Mike finally released him and pulled out a celebratory cigarette, but not without making an even bigger mess of Jamie's hair first.

"He'll show. It's Lip. He'd think it was rude if he _didn't_ show up."

"Or he'd be smart, seeing as this looks a lot like we're trying to get him alone so we can kill him."

"Yes, but!" Mike pointed at Jamie with his cigarette, a few ashes falling just short of landing on Jamie's shirt. "He's Lip, so he's gonna be an optimist about it and hope that you've actually got something for him and are just being shy. Lip's a nice guy. He'll show."

~~~

It was 1:24, and Lip had yet to show. Jamie and Mike were hiding out behind a pair of large red maple trees, failing miserably to pretend that they weren't staring ardently at the bench where they'd requested for Officer Frost to meet them. Jamie had proposed the idea that perhaps Officer Frost was doing the same thing as them and was hiding out to see who would meet him, but Mike had proclaimed that this idea was ridiculous, because they were already in the best hiding place near the bench, and Officer Frost therefore would have already joined them by the trees if Jamie was right.

Jamie told him he was full of it, but Mike had shushed him as a particularly suspicious looking dog walker went by ("that pug is fucking sketchy, man, that's a fucking police pug"), so he dropped it.

"Look, Mikey, he's not showing. For all we know nobody even told him about the meet, or maybe something came up. Maybe they didn't send anybody at all because I sounded like I was out of my goddamn mind. Fuck, they probably think I was a drug addict looking to make a deal or something. This was such a bad idea-"

"Speak for yourself buddy, but it looks like another one of my excellent plans has worked."

Jamie's head whipped around fast enough he was lucky he didn't clip himself on the tree. A brown-haired man was approaching their bench, glancing at the rock formation near it that Jamie had used to identify the bench in his phone call and then back at the empty bench. He had on a white button down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a dark blue tie that matched the blue of his suit, the coat of which he had draped over one arm. Even though he had on dark sunglasses and was faced mostly away from the trees where Jamie and Mike were hiding out, Jamie was pretty sure he could have picked him out at a much greater distance from his silhouette alone.

Or at least Babe could have.

"Okay," Officer Frost said, holding his arms out as if in offering as he spoke to the general area around him. "I'm here."

He still had that same soft voice, the one that made you want to believe everything he said because it was so calm, so quietly confident that everything would be okay. Babe had followed that voice into battle and for a moment Jamie thought he'd be willing to do it all over again. God knew he could use some guidance right about now.

"Uh, hi there." Jamie stepped out from behind the tree, glancing back at Mike to drag him along behind him. Mike, for once, looked like he actually was at a loss for words.

"Fucking hell," Mike mumbled.

Okay, so lost for most words.

The look Frost gave them was more incredulous than Jamie thought his appearance really warranted. "You're the ones who called the tip line?"

"Yes, sir – uh, Officer Frost, sir. That was me." Jamie gave him a little wave, and then immediately wanting to slap himself for it.

It was made a little bit better by the hint of a smile curling the corners of Frost's mouth upwards, a smile that Jamie recognized because it was the same one that Lip would give the men when he was trying to scold them for their behavior without admitting that he was actually amused.

"It's Detective, actually. I haven't been an officer for a while now."

Jamie shared a look with Mike. "Oh, uh, sorry. We didn't know..."

Now Frost – _Detective_ Frost – actually did smile at them.

"Don't be. It's the only thing that convinced me to actually meet with you, against my lieutenant's wishes I should add. You've got him pissed off in spectacular fashion, I thought you'd like to know."

Mike looked far too smug for Jamie's liking, so he interrupted whatever Mike was about to say by asking, "We got your rank wrong, so you... _wanted_ to meet us?"

There was that patient Lip expression they were so used to. "If you were sent from the mafia to kill me, you probably wouldn't have asked for me by the wrong rank. The mafia knows what my rank is. And I also think they'd know where to find me if they wanted me. They have no reason to try to draw me out, especially by calling the tip line. Which meant that you probably weren't sent by the mafia, which made me curious. Am I really just that trustworthy-looking?"

"Yes," Jamie and Mike said simultaneously. Frost didn't look like he quite believed them, but he didn't fight for a better explanation.

"So, uh..." Jamie rubbed the back of his neck. "Thanks for showing up. Why does the mob know who you are?"

Frost gave him an odd look as if considering him carefully. "That's my division," he said slowly, "Organized Crime Investigation."

"Oh."

This time they received a wry smile. "Yeah. 'Oh.' So if I'm to believe that you picked me out from the press conference by my sincere looks alone, I'm also to believe that you have some 'sensitive information' to share with me?"

Jamie didn't know exactly what uncomfortable expression he made, which was probably for the best, because he looked somewhere around the vicinity of a particularly astonished trout.

"Oh. I, uh, yes, exactly. You see, we..." He trailed off, beyond lost, and turned his wide-eyed, desperate gaze on Mike. Mike was the one who chose this route, Mike could be the one to talk them out of it.

"We heard the shooting."

So Mike really _was_ going that route.

Frost, at least, looked mildly intrigued.

"Okay, you heard shooting. What happened?"

Mike pulled out his cigarettes and started fidgeting with them. Jamie would have been surprised at him showing off such an obvious tell, except this was Lipton they were talking to. There was always something about him that made it difficult to lie to him. Probably something to do with that hangdog look he'd give you when you disappointed him. Even Bill hadn't been immune to that.

"We, uh, we heard shooting. And we got the fuck out of there because that's some bullshit we didn't want to deal with."

Detective Frost didn't give them the disapproving mother look. His expression was something much closer to "not taking any of your bullshit."

"So you heard shooting...and you left."

"Yes."

"And that was all."

"Yes."

"And that was the entirety of the sensitive information you had to share with me?"

Mike looked at Jamie, and then back at Frost.

"Yes."

Frost raised a single eyebrow, and not even Sister Mary Francis had ever made Jamie feel so much like a guilty schoolboy. When neither Jamie nor Mike seemed to be willing to meet his gaze or explain further, Frost sighed.

"Where did the shooting take place?"

Mike shrugged. "You know. The street. Outdoors. At night."

"Yes," Frost said slowly, "But where was it?"

"Look buddy," Mike said, flipping the soft pack of cigarettes over in his hands. "If you lost your own crime scene, that's not my problem."

Frost's expression turned bland. " _I_ know where my crime scene is. I just wanted to see if you did. Seeing as you obviously don't, I'm going to take it that extra step and say what we all know, which is that you also didn't hear the shooting. So if you'd like to explain to me why I wasted my time and risked my lieutenant's wrath to go against his orders to come out here and meet you two, I'd really appreciate it."

This seemed like Lip too, but not a part of Lip that Babe was usually exposed to. This wasn't Lipton with the men, gently but firmly shutting down whatever fresh nonsense was kicked up by ennui and youthful idiocy. This was Lipton with a certain Lieutenant Norman Dike, one hundred and ten percent done with everybody's bullshit and expecting an explanation sooner rather than later.

Jamie really only had more bullshit to offer him, and he didn't think it would be well-received.

"Look, we just really, really had to meet you, okay?" He cut off Frost's next remark to say, "Because you're...shit, man, I don't know. I can't lie to you, but I honestly can't tell you why either. Like, I probably shouldn't even be doing this right now."

Mike, who was elbowing him sharply in the ribs the whole time he was speaking, hissed, "No, you really shouldn't!"

"Look, Li- Detective. We just wanted to meet you, okay? You're right, we don't know shit about the shooting. We didn't even know the mafia was still a thing. We just saw you and we had to..."

"...say hi?" Mike offered.

"Yeah," Jamie agreed, "We had to say hi."

Frost's face was growing stonier by the second, and Jamie didn't need to know Carwood Lipton to know that Detective Frost was reaching the limits of his seemingly bottomless well of patience.

"If I want to be a jerk about it, I can arrest you for making a false report," he said. "And if that won't stick because you haven't actually _said_ anything, then maybe we'll call it obstruction of justice, because you hauled me out here to waste my time to say _hello_. So what is it that you want? Are you looking for cash? Did you think I looked like a pushover and that I'd just give you a reward for whatever weak bullshit you could throw my way?"

"What? No, wait, man, that's not it at all. We're not looking for anything, we just have to-"

"Play a game!" Mike interjected, grabbing onto Jamie's left arm and squeezing it meaningfully.

"You're playing games with me?" Frost's voice was low, dangerous, and Jamie had to go to work tomorrow.

"I have to go to work tomorrow!" he yelped, watching everything fall apart around him. "I can't get arrested because then I'll miss work and I'll get in so much fucking trouble if I miss again, so we should just-"

Before he could think better of it he darted forward and snapped up Frost's hand in one of his own – his right hand, the one that Jamie knew he would pull a gun with.

"I'm so fucking sorry, man. I'm really sorry. Just, tag, take care of yourself okay? Sorry for wasting your time, we have to go now."

Frost wrenched his hand free and Jamie didn't wait to see what he'd do next, instead grabbing onto Mike's arm and hauling ass out of there as quickly as possible. He could hear Frost shouting behind them and giving chase but didn't dare look back as they ran through a crowd of people, ducking their way through a tour group before Mike jerked them around the corner of a large statue and Jamie bounced directly off of somebody's chest and fell on his ass, his sudden backwards momentum dragging Mike down with him.

On the upside, it was unlikely that Frost would be able to make them out now when they were hidden among so many moving people. On the downside, they were in a serious danger of being stepped on and there was a man in an expensive suit staring down at them as if they were a mildly interesting smear he'd just discovered on the bottom of his shoe.

"Oh shit," Mike hissed between his teeth. Jamie heard it more than he saw it, because he was too busy staring up at the man in front of them, trying to kick his brain back online.

In a way, it made a certain kind of sense that where Carwood Lipton went, Ronald Speirs would be sure to follow.

"Are you alright?" the man in front of them asked, sounding less like he really cared for the answer and more like it was a formality.

"Oh, uh, yeah, we're fine."

"Speak for yourself," Mike was grumbling, making a show of rubbing his ass.

In a fit of genius, or maybe it was stupidity, Jamie thrust out his right hand at not-Speirs. The man simply looked at his hand and then back at his face. Jamie wiggled his fingers.

"A little help?"

The man stared at him for a very long moment, to the point where it became uncomfortable and Jamie was ready to stand up and come up with a new plan. And then, to his complete surprise, Speirs actually grabbed his hand, pulling him so easily to his feet that Jamie nearly fell off balance.

Before Speirs could let go, Jamie clutched at his hand. "Tag. Thanks, man."

"Yeah, thanks," Mike grunted as he stood up on his own.

Speirs glanced between the two of them, eyebrows slightly raised. When he said nothing, Jamie cleared his throat loudly.

"Okay, well then. We, uh, we should get going."

"You have to go to work tomorrow," Mike agreed.

Jamie pointed at him. "Exactly. So, uh, yeah. We'll be seeing you."

He grabbed Mike's arm again and walked as quickly as possible away from the man who was watching them leave, because the last thing he wanted was to be there when whoever Speirs was now realized that he had a spade branded onto his palm. Detective Frost too, for that matter, because he was undoubtedly still looking for them.

It wasn't until they finally made it back to the car, blocks and blocks away from the park, that Jamie finally dared to pull back his sleeve. He couldn't tell if he was relieved or disturbed to see that two more names had darkened to black on his arm.

"So I guess that worked," he sighed. Flipping open the pocket watch Cearnach had given him, it looked like the spade had filled in with more red. He snapped it shut and jammed it back in his pocket. "That was such a shit show."

Mike finally pulled out a cigarette and lit it, settling back in his seat with a sigh. "You're not wrong."

"But I don't know how we could have made it better either. It was just...shit. I don't know how we're supposed to do this. What counts as telling them what's going on? Does telling them that I can't tell them count as telling? Just, _fuck_ , man. Fuck."

"Damned if I know." Mike slowly rolled down the window to let the smoke out of the car, cursing and jiggling the knob when it jammed up partway. After a few shoves, the window went all the way down.

"Awesome," Jamie mumbled, slumping in his seat and squinting at the light that hit his eyes. Mike's hated sun had apparently decided to move over to the passenger side of the car. "We nearly got our asses arrested and may have almost broken the rules of this dumbass game and now the car is falling apart more than usual."

He punctuated his statement by yanking down the sun visor. A piece of paper fluttered down and landed softly in his lap.

"It's just the window, calm yourself. I can live with a window that doesn't go down all the way, and look, I got it to work anyways. Life's not _all_ shit, Jamie-boy. Just a little bit. Just a little shitty."

"Or a lot," Jamie murmured.

He held up the paper for Mike to see.

It was a note, thick black calligraphy on heavy stationary.

_That was a close one, Jimmy. I may not be so lenient next time. Watch what you say. I know I will be watching you._

_Yours,_

_C._

~~~

Jack Archer examined the mark on his palm with much more interest than he usually showed anything. A spade, to be sure, and one that didn't appear to be made of any sort of paint or dye that he had ever seen before. It was perfectly formed and flush with his skin and it didn't appear that any amount of scrubbing would make it fade. He idly wondered if even a blade would be enough to remove it.

He was sure it had something to do with those men who had run into him in the park today. The ones who had wanted so very badly to speak with Detective Benjamin Frost about some "sensitive information" regarding the latest run-in between rival organizations. At first Jack had just wanted to see who it was that was so eager to share what supposedly dangerous information they knew. It didn't do to have people so quick to share private information, after all. And, admittedly, he had been interested to see who would have the gall to so directly contact the police and not expect the consequences. Usually it was the sort of thing he would have sent somebody else to handle, but sometimes, Jack just liked to do his own legwork, if only for nostalgia's sake.

And besides, he was particularly interested in anything to do with one Detective Benjamin Frost.

It may have been considered in poor form to play favorites with the detectives dedicated to bringing down your criminal organization, but Ben Frost was far and away Jack's favorite detective. He had to admire the man's dedication, no matter how misguided. Frost would never be successful, of course – Jack hadn't gotten where he was today by losing his games – but it was fun to leave him clues, to watch him work. There was something so calming about watching him work.

And now Jack had a red spade imprinted on his palm, and he had watched Detective Frost absently rubbing at the very same shape on his own hand as he stalked out of the park, still in search of the two men who appeared to be responsible for the marks that connected them. Jack was quite interested as well to learn who they were. He didn't take any scarring of his physical person lightly.

It looked like he and Detective Frost had something in common now. Jack might have to orchestrate a meeting.

He had much to discuss with his favorite detective.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If every chapter contains the sort of research this one did I'm going to get myself on a government watch list.
> 
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	9. Mob Intrigue, or How Detective Lipton Makes New Friends While Waiting to Get His Crime Scene Back from the Damn FBI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Detective Ben Frost is assigned a rookie detective and catches him up on the case, all while pondering his odd meeting with two strangers in the park.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was supposed to finish A Goalie's Best Friend before continuing this fic, because that was part of an exchange, but I finished the semester (if you couldn't guess, grad school is murder on writing time) and finally thought up a good way to open this chapter, and I told myself, "I'm just going to write down the opening lines so I'll remember it for when I can come back to it." And then I wrote the first 3k in a few hours, and two days later wrote the rest in a few hours. This chapter came ridiculously easy to me, probably because I have notes on most of it and I've been rehearsing this one in my head for literally years.
> 
> Remember me mentioning that this fic would have full chapters from other guys' POVs? Here's the start of that.

"So how did your little stroll in the park go? Were they looking for reward money? Please say reward money. Tony picked 'poorly executed hit' and you know how I love to prove him wrong."

Sandra fell into step with Ben as soon as he walked into the building, the smile on her face open, warm, and eager. She had obviously been waiting for him, and they knew each other well enough that she didn't even pretend she wasn't doing so entirely so she could be the first to weasel answers out of him. Hauser _would_ have been the first...if Ben had bothered to tell him he was going.

But Hauser didn't appreciate when his detectives went against direct orders not to engage with sketchy phone calls from people claiming to have sensitive information about a massacre, so Ben thought he'd save him the antacids he'd need to take for his ever-present ulcers and just keep his trip to himself.

Well, himself, which automatically meant Sandra and Tony by extension. And probably Natalie knew too, by the time he got out of the building. She hadn't been in their unit for seven months and those two still kept her looped into all of the latest information like she'd never left.

(In all honesty, Ben didn't really mind. Natalie was a good detective, and a better friend. She knew how to keep a secret. Even if he couldn't say the same for his two remaining partners.)

"That depends," he said, letting the smallest of smiles curl around the edges of his mouth. He ducked into the break room, hoping against hope that the pot of coffee that had been freshly brewed when he left was still at least partially intact. "What did you wager?"

Naturally, the pot was long-emptied, only a few droplets left at the bottom from a kind soul who had decided that both reading and following the "IF YOU FINISH IT, CLEAN IT" sign was beyond their abilities. With a sigh, he set about scrubbing the pot on his own.

"Glory and honor, naturally," Sandra replied. Already on his wavelength, she grabbed a canister from the cupboard and began measuring out coffee grounds. "Also, who has to pay for pizza the next time we stay late."

Ben shot her a wry smile. "As long as it's not me, I'll feel comfortable telling you that you're both wrong."

Sandra's eyebrows shot up in obvious disbelief. "Really. You're telling me they had actual information?"

"I didn't say that." He waved a finger at her chidingly before leaning down to squint at the controls on the coffeemaker. There were only four buttons and he still could never manage to get it right.

With an overzealous sigh, Sandra nudged him out of the way and pressed two buttons; the machine suddenly came to life.

"There. I got you your caffeine; now spill. If they weren't terrible hitmen or looking for reward money _or_ actual informants, who were they?" She went to push a hand through her tight dark curls, wrinkling her nose when she felt empty air. She'd been doing it all week since she'd cropped her hair short for the summer, and Tony still hadn't stopped snickering over it, offering to get her a wig to help her transition.

("If I wanted a wig," she'd said primly, "I'd borrow one of my mom's. I've seen your disgusting gelled hair every day for four years, Scarlatti. I don't think you have the right to be picking out _other people's_ hairstyles.")

Ben shrugged, partially just because he knew it would frustrate her. "I don't know."

If possible, her eyebrows had somehow, without moving an inch, become even more unimpressed.

"You don't know."

"Nope," he said, trying and failing to hide his smile. "I honestly have no clue. The whole thing was...strange. I got to the meeting place and nobody was there, and then they came out from behind some trees and I'm pretty sure they were actually trying to hide back there."

"As would any reasonable person," Sandra said with a nod, reaching to grab two clean mugs from the cabinet. "You're terrifying."

"Of course," Ben replied blandly. "Though honestly, these guys might have been afraid of me. They kept alternating between looking like they wanted to run for it and actually looking happy to see me. Like they were relieved I was there. Which makes absolutely no sense, because when it came down to it, they couldn't explain why they'd wanted to see me so badly other than that thought I looked inviting and they wanted to say hi."

"And," he tacked on, almost as an afterthought, "One of them made some sort of remark about playing a game."

"A game?" The eyebrow was possibly reaching all new heights. If it had ever gone down at all. "What kind of bullshit is that?"

"I don't know, Sandy. They were kids. Not like high school kids, but you know..." He trailed off and shrugged. "Young guys. Young and dumb and probably daring each other to stir up the cops just to see if they could do it. I didn't get the feeling that they wanted something from us. They actually seemed embarrassed when I asked if they were after reward money. I got a little terse with them and they completely freaked out, apologized and ran off. I tried to follow them but I lost them in the crowds."

"Because that doesn't scream 'guilty' at all."

Ben shrugged again. "Like I said, I don't know. They were definitely hiding something, but they weren't happy about it. They mostly just seemed uncomfortable. Whatever they were doing, they didn't like it."

He would have pounced on the coffee as soon as it was done, but Sandra nudged him out of the way again, setting to work on both of their mugs with deft hands. After she'd finished doctoring it, she slid Ben's mug to him and gave him a calculating look, her lips pursed.

"You think they were being coerced?"

Ben wrapped his hands around the warm mug; he imagined he could feel it seeping through his skin, making his palms tingle.

"Maybe. They kept calling me an officer until I corrected them. If one of the families had sent them, you'd think they would have at least given them accurate intel. The kids said they didn't even know that the mafia was still 'a thing,' and honestly, I felt pretty inclined to believe them. If somebody sent them, it wasn't anyone we know."

"Yet," Sandra corrected. "Anyone we know _yet_. If they sent those guys to talk to you to try to send some sort of message, you know it's not the last we've seen of them."

"Seen of who?"

Tony slid into the room like he owned it, heading for the coffee with all of the focus and subtlety of a heat-seeking missile. He'd brought his travel mug, and seeing as Tony rarely made coffee at his own house if he could get somebody else to do it for him, he'd either guessed that's where they had ended up when Ben had gotten back, or he was just hoping to find somebody to scrounge off of. Knowing Tony, it was probably a little bit of both.

"Hauser wants to talk to us," he said, his nudging not nearly as gentle as Sandra's on his way to the coffee pot. "He looked pissed, but he's looked that way all day, so I'm not sure if he's learned about your little adventure yet."

He froze and pointed a finger at Ben. "Poorly executed hit?"

Ben smiled and shook his head. "Sorry buddy, it looks more like harmless college kids playing pranks to see if we'll jump."

"That could be a poor hit," Tony argued. "College kids would make for terrible hitmen. Did they want the reward money?"

Ben didn't even get a chance to say 'no' before Tony was already crowing his victory to Sandra, who was back to looking unimpressed. Then again, Tony rarely impressed her, and when he did, she'd almost certainly never let him know it. It would ruin their shtick.

"The results were inconclusive," she said with a huff. "We'll split the pizza costs."

"You've been proven wrong! Nobody can say I'm wrong, we just can't say that I've been proven _right_."

"Which _means_ that you can't say you've won, so it's a tie and we'll _split_ the costs-"

"Do I need to split up the two of you?" Ben interrupted. He tried his best to hide his amusement at their chastised looks. Technically he was their team leader, but he so rarely acted on it that most of the time they all forgot themselves.

Hauser, however, never forgot himself, and he almost certainly wouldn't forget how long they were taking to get to his office. Cutting off any continuing pizza arguments, Ben chivvied his partners down the hall and into the lieutenant's office.

Their boss was standing behind his desk, rifling through a manila file folder aimlessly in what was his own restrained version of pacing. A young man was standing off to the side in front of the desk, hands clasped behind his back and his posture tight and uncomfortable.

A young officer, then, probably freshly promoted on his first real assignment in NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau. Lt. George Hauser was admittedly intimidating, but only somebody new would be that painfully stiff when the man was so obviously not paying attention to him.

Hauser's head snapped up when they walked into the room; he'd been waiting on them, then. Given how stressed he'd been trying to find information about the shooting to placate the commissioner and NYPD's press team when all the information they had summed up to exactly nothing, Hauser had been pretty high-strung the last twenty-four hours. Making him wait didn't really do much to help that.

"You took your sweet time," he grumbled, shuffling the papers in his file once more before flipping it shut. Ben had worked with him long enough to know that Hauser's ire wasn't truly aimed at them.

"Sorry about that sir, we were caught up talking about the case."

He could practically see Hauser's ears perk up. "And?"

Ben grimaced apologetically. "Nothing new sir, but you'll be the first to know when we have something. You wanted to see us?"

Hauser sighed and rubbed a hand over his face, which had been looking perpetually ruddy of late. "Yes, yes. This is..." He trailed off and gestured at the young dark-haired officer still standing so awkwardly in front of his desk.

"Javier Flores, sir."

"Detective Flores, yes. Just got his detective's shield, passed the exam with flying colors. He's going to be your replacement for Vega."

"Wow. That only took seven months."

Hauser glared at Tony, but Tony, who was blithely immune after being the recipient on so many occasions, gave him a winning smile in return.

"If you haven't noticed, Scarlatti, we haven't exactly had a budget to throw around for promoting new detectives, and when the powers that be _do_ feel like throwing us a bone, they don't want it going to the _Organized Crime Investigation Division_. Narco and Gangs are the ones that the public cares about, and those are the ones that they want beefed up."

"And since the mob popped up in the news again, they decided that they should throw something our way," Ben finished.

Hauser's grimace was probably as close as he could get to a smile with the level of indigestion he'd been complaining about. "Four is a nice, round number to have on a team. Just take the gift and stop looking the horse in the mouth or they'll transfer this one away from you too."

His desk phone rang then, effectively cutting off whatever else he was going to say. Cursing under his breath, Hauser waved them out of the office.

"Sir?" Ben said. "What do you want us to do with Flores?"

"Take him," Hauser barked, covering the mouthpiece of the phone. "Train him, put him to work. He's yours."

Ben could tell from his expression that further interruptions were not going to go over any better, and so he gave Flores a tight smile and gestured him out the door.

"So," Tony said, sounding far too entertained already. "Kid. What do you know about the mafia?"

The "kid" bristled at being referred to as such, but didn't remark on it. "Not much outside of the movies. I didn't really think they were a thing anymore."

"Nobody does," Sandra said, sighing through her teeth.

"Well, to be honest," Flores began carefully, "When they said I was going to the OCCB, I kind of thought they meant, you know..." He gestured at himself.

Three sets of eyebrows rose at once.

"You thought..." Tony prompted.

"You know." Flores's tanned skin was starting to darken as he flushed. "Like, Gangs or something. I just figured, it seemed probable."

They reached their set of desks, four pushed against each other in a cluster in their own corner. Sandra began clearing papers and overflow materials off of the unoccupied desk.

Ben put a hand on Flores's arm. "Flores-"

"Javier," Flores interrupted. "Some of the guys call me Javi."

Ben smiled. "Hi, Javier. I'm Detective Ben Frost, and these are Detectives Sandra Laurent and Tony Scarlatti. Look, if you would rather be in another division, that's okay. We can ask Hauser to put you in for a transfer. We've been waiting on a new detective for a while, but he was right when he said that we aren't generally a priority division for new staff, and especially our team in particular. If you want to be somewhere else, I can put in a word on your behalf."

Javier's face had somehow grown even darker.

"No! I mean, um, no, sir. That won't be necessary. I didn't really... _want_ to be in Gangs. I just thought..."

"That they would put all the Latinos over there?" Tony was smirking. "I mean, you're not wrong. Why do you think the Sicilian guy is in the mob division?"

"And the black woman, and the West Virginian snowflake, and the Latino kid," Sandra muttered, sweeping the last of the papers off of what would now be Javier's desk. "Yeah, Tony, we're practically in the old country over here."

"I didn't even grow up in West Virginia," Ben protested. When faced with his partners, he'd stopped trying to argue the pale comments a long time ago.

Only Tim had ever been paler, after all.

Ben grimaced at the thought, looking down and taking a page from Hauser's book to push aimlessly at the haphazard files covering his desk.

"Whatever your expectations were, Javier," he said, speaking over whatever unheard bickering Sandra and Tony may have gotten into, "If you don't want to be in Organized Crime, we can work on that. But if you'd like to stay, you're more than welcome to."

"I do, sir," he said quickly, the urgency of a newly minted badge in his voice. It had been years since Ben was in that same vulnerable position, willing to say and do anything to avoid losing his brand new position as a detective. It wasn't a feeling he particularly cared to revisit.

"Well, okay then. Welcome aboard. And you don't have to call me sir; these two never would, and I'm not about to make you be the only one."

"Thank you, s- Ben." Javier gave him a quick smile, perhaps a little wavering but still there.

Ben clapped him on the shoulder. "That's that, then. This desk here next to Sandra's is yours. Feel free to settle in. Uh, before we get started, do you have any questions for us? Because otherwise we'll probably end up talking at you for a while to get you up to speed."

"Not really..." Javier fell silent in thought, and then asked, "Who was Vega? The one who Hauser said got transferred."

Tony snorted loudly, and Ben was torn between rolling his eyes and smiling. Sandra was conspicuously silent on the topic.

"Detective Natalie Vega," Ben explained, giving the kid a break. He scratched absently at his palm. "She used to be attached to our team, but a little over six months ago she was transferred to Narco."

"Oh. Did she...want to be transferred?"

Ben weighed his words carefully. "Not as such, no, but she understood why it was happening."

He could tell that Javier sorely wanted to ask but was afraid he would come off as rude. Luckily for him, Ben suspected that Tony may have been incapable of actually feeling any shame at all.

"You know there's a policy about dating within your own team," Tony said slowly, his eyes lit with an almost devilish glee.

Javier nodded carefully, not catching on.

Tony smirked. "Well, if that rule had been observed within this team, Natalie would still be here."

They were really going to have to do something about Javier's blushing, Ben decided, if only so he could talk to suspects without looking abruptly flustered.

Javier stared at Tony. "So you mean that you two..." He waved his hand in Tony's direction; Tony barked a laugh.

"Me? No, no, no, I'm _definitely_ not Natalie's type."

"Oh."

Slowly, too slowly, Javier's head swung around so that he could look at Ben with new interest. Ben held up his hands.

"Hey, don't look at me for that one."

Javier blinked at him in confusion, and Ben felt like he could practically see the cogs turning in his head as he processed that information. His eyes suddenly lit with a new understanding and he looked, wide-eyed, towards Sandra, who was staring steadfastly at her phone and not at her partners.

"So, does that mean...you and Detective Vega were..."

" _We_ are dating, yes." If anyone could kill with a look, it would be Sandra, and the gaze she leveled at Javier all but dared him to test his fate.

Javier evidently had a healthy sense of self-preservation, because he held up his hands in surrender and took a step back. "Hey, that's, uh, that's cool. I'm sure she's very, uh...nice?"

It was intended to be a statement, but his intonation still ticked upwards into a question at the end, obviously unsure of himself. Javier looked to Ben beseechingly, probably able to recognize that he would receive more sympathy there than from Tony. Seeing as Ben wasn't the fan of watching people squirm that Tony was, he decided to help things along.

"Natalie is an excellent detective," he said, "She's just applying her skills in Narcotics instead of with us. I'm sure you'll meet her soon enough. But back to the situation at hand, we need to get you up to speed on the case."

Javier visibly sighed, his whole body relaxing now the danger of facing Sandra's wrath had passed. "The shootout last night, right? The spokespeople won't say that it's anything but 'rival organizations' but the news insists that it's the mafia and not just gangs. Given how they rushed me over here today, I'm guessing that the news was right?"

"They have to get it right once in a while." Tony threw himself back in his chair with a flourish, causing it to roll backwards a few feet.

"Which is why," Ben said, "We have to catch you up on what's been going on. There's a lot to cover, so it's easiest to start with asking what you already know."

"Yeah," Javier said, sitting almost cautiously in his new chair, as if they might take it away from him at any moment. "I don't really know anything other than the Godfather."

"Well, it's a start. What were you working in before you got promoted?"

Javier flushed again, in what was appearing to be a trend. He would want to get a handle on that soon, or Tony (and maybe Sandra too) would never let him get over it.

"Traffic Enforcement," he mumbled, as if he were embarrassed. Ben could perhaps understand – it wasn't the most glamorous place to work.

Tony perked up. "Traffic Enforcement? You ever dealt with towing companies there?"

Javier frowned, but nodded. "Yeah, all the time. For parking infractions, things like that."

Sandra "tsked" to herself and Tony reached over their desks to clap Javier on the shoulder.

"Congratulations," he said with a face-splitting grin, "Then you've already dealt with the mafia. You'll be a pro in no time."

"Towing services are run by the mafia?"

"Sometimes." Sandra leaned back against the edge of her desk and crossed her arms. "It's similar to the whole 'waste management' thing that you may have heard about on tv. The businesses might be legal, but they play games to get contracts, manipulate and extort people to win certain territories. Their other biggest ventures right now tend to be in construction. It's more contract work, more unionized work. They run the unions, they can make sure that their own guys get the jobs. They skirt the lines of legality, but not enough so that it's easy to charge them with anything. That's how they stay alive nowadays, in plain sight."

"Which isn't to say that they don't still participate in the seedy underbelly of the world," Tony continued for her. "Some families made some less-than-legal ventures into the real estate business in recent years. Lots of preying on homebuyers, causing damage to get the insurance payouts. All of your typical sleazebag stuff. And like you see in the movies, they've got stores and restaurants that serve for fronts for illegal gambling, loan sharking, drugs, prostitution – you name it, they've probably done it in the back room of a pizzeria."

Javier was frowning.

"If everyone knows all of this stuff is going on, then why aren't these guys getting arrested?"

Ben grimaced and sighed. "Well, it's not that easy. For starters, even if we know something is going on, the mafia tends to be very thorough when it makes sure that we don't have enough evidence for a conviction. And when there is enough evidence, they make sure that we can't tie it back to anybody in charge.

"The mafia is typically arranged following a hierarchical structure. At the top you have the boss, who's in charge of the whole family. He's got a consigliere, who's like an advisor – that was Robert Duvall in the Godfather – and he's got an underboss, who's sort of like his right hand man and his vice president all rolled into one. It's typically a son or close family member or friend who's expected to take over things in the boss's absence. While the boss oversees the whole picture, the underboss is in charge of the actual operations. Beneath the underboss are a series of captains, who are called capos-"

"Caporegime," Tony interjected.

Ben tried not to roll his eyes at his smug expression.

"Yes, thank you. Like I was saying, there are typically multiple captains, each of whom have specific roles, usually running a certain venture. Under each captain will be a group of men who report to him – soldiers, made men. They're the bottom of the official hierarchy of what qualifies as actual members of the family. Below them are any number of associates who are affiliated with the family and do work for them, but aren't officially members."

"When you're a member, you have protection," Tony cut in again. "Nobody will touch a made man without permission because they don't want to bring down the wrath of the whole family. But not everybody gets made. Families like to limit their numbers, and they won't even think about accepting you if you aren't both male and Italian. Sometimes they let you in if you're Italian on your dad's side, but your mom's side doesn't usually count, and non-Italians are right out."

"Like De Niro in Goodfellas?" Javier asked.

Tony smirked. "Look at that, he's seen two movies! Yes, like in Goodfellas. You can be an associate, but if you're not Italian, you're never going to get made. And if you're not made, nobody gives a shit about you. That's why if we're able to catch anybody, we get associates."

"Because they aren't even considered official members by the mafia itself," Sandra said, "It's hard to tie them back to anybody higher up. If you're lucky you can bring a soldier down with them, but the mafia's structure makes it very difficult to actually tie the people in charge to a crime. That's why they got Capone on tax evasion – they knew he was responsible for a lot more and a lot worse, but it was the only thing they could officially charge him for. Sometimes we get lucky and get to bring people to trial, but a lot of the time it's like fighting a hydra: every time you chop off a few heads, three more sprout back in their places."

"So we're fighting a losing battle?"

Ben exchanged glances with Sandra and Tony. Slowly, he began, "It can feel that way sometimes, yes. That's part of why the OCCB collaborates with the FBI in a joint task force. We can cover more ground, more jurisdictions. They have different rights and abilities than we do. It can be... _frustrating_ , at times, but it's hard enough to pin a crime on these people, so every little bit helps."

"The _FBI_ ," Sandra cut in, balling her hands into fists, "Is the reason why we're sitting here right now having a chat instead of checking out our crime scene. Three hundred and sixty-four days out of the year they're content to let us run the investigations, and then the _one_ day when something massive happens that could actually lead us somewhere, the FBI swoops in claiming that it has jurisdiction over everything and we have to clear the area and let them work. They don't give a damn about the actual investigation until they think something worthwhile is happening, and then they take all the credit. Lord knows it's the first time they've given two shits about the Demizio family in years."

"Is that the family involved in the shooting?" Javier asked.

Sandra nodded. "We're pretty sure, yes. We aren't sure who the other guys were, but preliminary reports are that at least some of those guys were associates of the Demizio family, and that's a damn big deal – probably our biggest break in a year! – and we have to sit here and wait for the FBI to give us their table scraps."

This was probably where Ben should have interjected in the name of good interorganizational relations and corrected Sandra's assertions, except that he actually kind of agreed with her. He was more frustrated than anyone that the FBI would try to take over his case, particularly _this_ case.

When he tuned back into the conversation, Javier was asking, "What's so important about them?"

"The Demizio family is our primary focus," Tony explained. "Each team in our division is centered on investigating the workings of an individual family. The bigger the family, the more people assigned to the case."

"So this Demizio family is pretty small, right?"

Even Ben couldn't help laughing then.

"Not quite," he said. "It's not just a matter of the size of the family, but how prevalent they are – or rather, how easy it is to tie things to them. There have been big arrests in the Genovese and Lucchese families these past few years, so a lot of focus has been put on investigating them. The Demizio family...the way they're organized, by the time we can close in on them for something – a business, for example – they've already cut all ties with it and moved on to the next greatest thing. If we're investigating them for prostitution, they focus on gambling. If we go after gambling, they go for drugs. We're always a few steps behind them. The only things they don't give up are their contract businesses and that's because they know we don't have enough to charge them for those anyway. And when we can't make arrests, we don't get deemed as high a priority."

"We're their half-assed attempt to act like they're doing something," Tony said. "That's why they let us wait so long after Natalie was transferred just to get a new guy. They figure we aren't doing anything important anyway."

"Except our jobs," Sandra said. She sounded every bit as bitter about it as Ben knew she truly was. "They get upset that we have low arrest rates and make slow progress so they give us less people to work with? That makes sense."

"About as much sense as not letting us have access to our own crime scene," Tony agreed.

Javier looked contemplative, his brow furrowed in thought. "So what you're saying is that these Demizio guys are actually good at what they do."

"Too good," Ben sighed and rubbed his hands against his pants. "Like we said, it's nearly impossible to pin a crime on an actual made man because all we can catch are associates. And with the way that the Demizio family has been run these last few years, even that is getting harder and harder."

"What happened?" Javier looked to each of them for an answer.

Sandra shot Ben a look. "I think that's your cue," she said. _It's your white whale_ , he could practically hear her say in his head.

He sighed. "To put things into context, the Demizio family was previously run by a Salvatore Demizio, who inherited it from his father. He was a pretty typical boss, up until the early eighties. His wife Teresa was taking their four year old daughter Francesca to visit her mother. On the way their car was t-boned by another driver, completely out of the blue. Teresa, Francesca, and the body guard who was driving them were all killed, but the driver of the other car fled the scene and was never identified. It was never ruled as foul play, but common sense indicated that it was an act of war from another family. If that was true, we never found out about it. But it changed how Salvatore ran his business. He was devastated by the loss. Reports say that losing his daughter hit him the hardest. I guess you could say that's true, because following that attack he declared a new rule that nobody in his family was ever to harm a child again. If they wanted to send a message, they could find another way to do it, and if a kid witnessed a crime, it was the guy's fault for being dumb enough to get caught. But nobody was ever to hurt a kid, on pain of death."

Javier's expression was a mixture of confusion and mild horror. "Was that not already a thing?"

Sandra snorted in a manner that was eerily reminiscent of Tony. Maybe they were rubbing off on each other.

"Not really, no. Despite the media and what the families would have you believe, most of those stories about how women and children weren't to be touched are full of shit. If they thought a woman was a threat because she knew something, they wouldn't hesitate to kill her. Kids too, if they could talk about what they saw. It was therefore a sickeningly big deal for Demizio to make the announcement that nobody was to touch a kid, not even if that kid saw enough to get you locked up for life. Innocent wives and girlfriends he could care less about, but the kids had to be left alone."

"And that's exactly what everyone did," Tony said. "That's why other criminals call the Demizios 'orphan-makers' – they'll kill a kid's parents right in front of them, but the kids themselves are safe. Not from the psychological damage, mind you, that part lasts a lifetime. But I guess at least they're left that lifetime to contemplate things."

"Believe it or not, that's _progressive_ for the mafia," Sandra added. "They still don't typically allow women in. _Sometimes_ they let them be associates, and that's considered a big deal on its own. It's nauseating."

"That's part of the big shake-up these last few years," Ben said, trying to get things back on track. "A few years after the accident, Salvatore remarried and had a son named Giancarlo, commonly known as Carlo. His second wife died of breast cancer six years ago; he donated enough money to the hospital to pay for a new oncology ward, so I guess there are some good things to come out of mob money. Anyways, Carlo grows up and joins the family business. He was a captain, which was expected to be a way of grooming him to be the new underboss when the old guy either retired or died."

They were reaching Tony's favorite part of the story, so Ben wasn't at all surprised when he cut in, "And then everything went wrong, because Carlo is the world's biggest idiot. Nobody knows the specifics, but he was trying to torture a husband and wife for information. It apparently wasn't working, because Carlo got the bright idea that they might feel more like talking if their kids were at stake. He started torturing the poor things in front of their parents. I won't get into the details of it, but they died."

Javier looked a little queasy, which Ben found understandable. Even in their line of work, the idea of someone hurting kids like that still made him a little sick to his stomach. He could understand Salvatore Demizio's motivation: no kid deserved to be harmed for the results of their parents' actions.

"Of course, Salvatore found out," Tony was saying, "And he lost his shit. He was so betrayed, couldn't believe that his own son would go against him like that. If it were anyone else, he'd have killed them on the spot. But it was Carlo, his own son, and his wife was already gone. They'd only had the one kid, and Carlo was all he had left. So Salvatore tells him that what he did was unforgiveable, but because Carlo's his son, he'll spare him his life. But he had to leave their territory immediately and never come back, or Salvatore wouldn't hesitate to give orders to have him killed."

"I can't say I'm upset," Javier said, getting some of his confidence back.

Tony shook his head. "Me neither. But Carlo was supposed to be Salvatore's successor, so ousting him created a power vacuum. Other families started sniffing around to see if they could make a play for Demizio territory. So Salvatore names his new successor, and everyone loses their minds even worse than before, because it's this nobody kid that he found on the streets."

"What?"

Ben sighed again. Christ, but he was tired.

"His name is Jack Archer, or at least, that's the name we have. I doubt it's his real name because nobody has ever been able to find a record of him, and he isn't that old. The story, from what we could piece together, goes that one day, Salvatore ran into a scrappy little street urchin and decided to take him in, perhaps because he had a soft spot for kids. That kid was Jack Archer, and over the years Salvatore gave him roles in his business because he was fond of him. He never formally adopted him, but the families all knew that Archer was his son in everything but name and blood. That was pretty scandalous, because Archer, as far as anyone knows, is not at all Italian. Even when Archer was just a soldier acting as Salvatore's personal bodyguard, a lot of other families still saw his position as a made man to be blasphemous. Most wouldn't acknowledge him, which led to more friction between the families.

"The real scandal came when Carlo was disowned. Archer didn't move up in official rank, but he was spending more time with the boss than ever – some say he even acted as an advisor. And then it came out a few years ago that Salvatore named Archer as his new heir. People were extremely upset, especially Demizio's underboss, who was a long-time friend. But nobody would openly oppose the decision, because Demizio was scary on his own, and Archer was even worse."

"There are a lot of rumors of him playing games with prisoners of other families," Sandra said, "And they all end in him killing them."

"He's a really pleasant guy," Tony added. "But what Ben didn't say is that the _real_ real scandal came just this year when ol' Sal had a heart attack and kicked the bucket. I bet the reading of his estate was real fun. A quarter of his estate went to his younger sister – she's a pediatrician with two kids and a picket fence out in New Jersey, never been involved in the family business. Another quarter of the estate was split up among Salvatore's long-term staff – his maids, his gardeners, his driver, his cook, everyone who kept his day to day life going so he didn't have to. It was almost philanthropic of him. But that last half – _all_ of it went to Archer, including his businesses and his title. Absolutely nothing went to Carlo, despite his protests.

"Suddenly, everything was up in the air. Salvatore wanted his power passed on to Archer, but people disagreed with that choice and mutiny was in the air. Somehow Archer managed to survive it all and come out on top. He's still impossible to catch, but he's pissed off a lot of people. He's started choosing soldiers based on merit and abilities instead of connections. He's letting in women and non-Italians. He himself being a non-Italian is enough to make some people mutinous, but adding more non-Italians is just too much for them to handle. The fact that he's lived this long without one of his own guys killing him is amazing."

Sandra took over again.

"His new inclusiveness has helped him, though. He runs a better business by picking the most talented people. They're smart, and they're loyal because they know they were made against protests from establishment-types. They're a big part in how he manages to move so quickly and stay ahead of us at each step. We thought for sure we'd be able to catch him during the transfer of power, but instead, Archer's now more invincible than ever.

"That's why the shooting was important. It was big, and it was sloppy, and it was publicized. All of those things go against Archer's MO, but those were known Demizio associates involved. This case could be the break we need to finally get something on this guy, and yet here we are, sitting at our desks, waiting patiently for the FBI to give us their leftovers."

When Ben looked at Javier, he appeared to be mulling everything over, his expression one of deep concentration. Finally, he said, "So we really don't know where this Archer guy came from?"

"Nope," Tony replied. "Not a clue. We've done facial recognition scanning, we've searched his name, hell, at one point we even ran a search of missing persons and former wards of the state that fit his characteristics. We found nothing. Whoever Jack Archer really is, nobody knows, and he's not telling."

"But we're going to find out," Ben said, scratching at his right palm with his left hand. "You're right, Javier: he had to come from somewhere. If we could find out his past, it would tell us a lot about where he's going now. But at the moment, just the crime scene would suffice."

"Stop scratching your hand, Ben," Sandra chided, interrupting him to place a hand over his wrist. "Look, you're making it all red."

Ben was about to protest that it wasn't that bad, sight-unseen, until her concerned expression made him actually glance down at his hands. His left hand looked perfectly normal – scratched, a little dry, but nothing unusual. His right hand – that was another story.

A big, vividly red spade was etched onto his palm, the skin around it flushed red from copious scratching.

"What the hell?" he murmured. He was about to examine his hand further when his phone buzzed to inform him of a text message from an unknown number. Hoping that it was something important – _like permission to examine his own damn crime scene_ – Ben eagerly opened it.

_Hello, Detective Frost._

_I would like to arrange a meeting with you to discuss the two men whom you met in the park today and the spade marked on your hand. Please meet me in the same place next Monday at noon. Come alone._

_I look forward to meeting you._

There was no signature, no indication of the sender. It seemed far too sophisticated to be from the guys he had met earlier today – and how would they have gotten his phone number? How had _this_ person gotten his phone number? He could have forensics try to trace the number the text was sent from, but he had a feeling that it would tie back to a burner phone or a number that was no longer in service.

They knew about the spade mark. How did they know about it when he had just only discovered it himself?

"Ben? Are you okay?"

The hand that Sandra laid on his shoulder snapped him to attention.

Tony whistled lowly. "Christ, Benji, you look like you've seen a ghost. Who was the message from?"

Ben swallowed tightly, looking down at his phone again and then back up at his partners.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Stefon voice* This fic has everything: reincarnation, angry fairies, road trips, best friends who make bad decisions together, mafia intrigue, enemies in love, long waits for updates, that thing where sometimes the POV shifts and suddenly it's a whole new storyline.
> 
> Up until 2016, the NYPD did have an Organized Crime Control Bureau, and given that this fic takes place from 2014-2015, I included that here. I couldn't find more about its organization than the individual divisions, so I made up everything else (it is all lies, do not take this as anything more than Hollywood-style cops and robbers). For the purposes of this fic, the Organized Crime Investigation Division of the OCCB is broken up by mafia family, but I strongly doubt it's like that in real life. Assume everything I write here is wrong. All of my knowledge comes from the internet and tv.
> 
> Also, I hope you guys like Ben's partners, because I do and you'll be seeing a lot more of them. I like writing their friendships. Ben and Sandra are each other's mom-friend, and Tony is their pet dick. And now Javi is the baby! It's gonna be great.
> 
> [Map](https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1759631#) | [Tumblr](https://armypeaches.tumblr.com)


	10. Flower Picking, or How Bill Continues a Lifelong Vendetta Against Costumed Actors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys finally start their road trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regular reminders that everything is unedited and that any travel information found within should be read while wearing only the finest quality belief suspenders.

Jamie imagined that most people had probably never received a threat from a capricious supernatural being that had already placed an expiration date on their life for the sole purpose of getting their jollies. As such, he figured there probably wasn't much of a protocol to follow in such a situation, and concluded that ignoring the shit out of it all was the best course of action.

For four days, that method was working out splendidly. Jamie went in for his shifts at the bar and all but threw himself into his job. He made small talk with the regulars, he was on top of everyone's orders, he had everything cleaned up for the night in record time – now, when John gave him weird looks, it was usually because he didn't understand how Jamie had suddenly become the picture of a model employee.

"Are you  _sure_  you're okay, kid?" he asked again on Saturday night (Sunday morning, really) after close. "You've been a bit...manic."

" _No_ , no, of course not. No." Jamie didn't look up from fervently scrubbing at a particularly stubborn stain on table five that looked vaguely like Abraham Lincoln. He may have to spray this one and let it sit for a while to break it down, or maybe if he was gentle he could scrape it off with a knife without scratching the table? "I'm fine."

"Okay, but see, now I know you're lying, because that table has had that stain for about as long as you've been alive, and on a normal day, you would know that."

Jamie froze in what he was doing, looking slowly from the table to his boss, standing next to him with his arms crossed, and back to the table.

"Oh. Yeah, of course."

Whoops.

"So do you want to tell me what all this is about?"

No, not really, unless he fancied having Cearnach follow through on his threats even earlier than expected.

"No, I'm sorry, I'm fine. It's just, uh. Personal stuff. Relationship problems."

John may have cared about his employees, but he was also allergic to hearing about anyone's relationships, and was more likely to pat you on the back and hand you a beer than he was to sit and listen to your romantic woes.

As expected, John's grey eyebrows pinched together and he ran a hand through his thinning hair.

"Oh. Um, okay. Then just, uh... Be safe." He patted Jamie on the shoulder. "You want a beer?"

Jamie had to keep himself from snorting in laughter, but he still cracked a smile.

"No, thanks. Think I'm gonna head out as soon as I finish the tables."

"Alright. Well..." John nodded and gripped his shoulder again before heading back to the supply room.

Jamie shook his head, still smiling to himself. Some things, at least, were predictable.

~~~

Given his understanding of predictability, he should have expected the scene that met him at home. Because if there was one thing that Mike hated the most, other than child singers and people who walked slowly down stairs while looking at their phones, it was inactivity when shit needed to get done. And four days without any progress on where to find the guys – well, Jamie really should have seen it coming.

Mike had their slightly beat-up map mounted on the wall and had apparently been getting creative with thumb tacks and string. Considering that they didn't own a corkboard to put under that map, Jamie's initial reaction was to wince, knowing that he would have to pick up some spackle to fill in all of the holes Mike was making.

His second reaction was to ask, "Okay, I don't really want to know, but what the actual fuck are you doing?"

Mike glanced at him over his shoulder before turning back to scrutinizing the map and fiddling with the knot on a piece of red string tying two of the tacks together, and as Jamie stepped closer, he could see that those tacks were in Philadelphia and New York City.

"What does it look like I'm doing, I'm making a map of our travels."

"At..." Jamie glanced at his phone. "Three in the morning?"

"Well, maybe you shouldn't work so late and we wouldn't have those problems."

"Where did you even get string?"

Mike shot him his most offended look, which was somewhere between a pouting bulldog and an old lady who just watched you cough without covering your mouth.

"I craft," he said primly.

"You fucking well do not."

"But I  _could_  craft. I could craft whatever the fuck I put my mind to. Do you know what the package said? It said there were thousands of uses for that string.  _Thousands_. I could do  _thousands_  of things with it because I am a capable human being-"

"Okay, shut up, you need to go to bed."

"I will  _not_." If anything, Mike actually looked more offended now. "Because I am actually making progress here. Look."

He took a step to the side so that he could make a grand, sweeping gesture at the map.

"...It's the map, and you've put thumbtacks in it to show where we've been so far. Yes, I can see that."

"Well, yeah, but like, no, look, it's better than that. Because this way, we can like, keep track of where we've been, and identify patterns and shit."

"We've barely  _been_  anywhere," Jamie sighed, sitting on the arm of the couch to get a better look at Mike's creation.

"Not yet, we haven't, but we will.  _Because_..." Mike came over to the coffee table in front of the couch and slapped a hand down onto the book, which was open again, this time with a fistful of fast food receipts marking the page. "I found another page with writing on it!"

Jamie had to admit that Mike's dedication was admirable. He quickly grew bored of flipping through the seemingly endless pages of the book, looking for one that not only had writing on it but was halfway legible (when they did find pages with writing, most were written in characters that they couldn't ever hope to interpret), especially when the pages seemed to have a nasty habit of moving around or disappearing entirely. But despite the book supposedly not being "for" him, Mike seemed to have rather whole-heartedly thrown himself into the role of being the "keeper" of the book, given the amount of time he spent pouring over its pages in search of clues and direction.

If only the sisters could see Mike now, not only voluntarily but enthusiastically reading a book. They'd probably want him hauled in for an exorcism, assuming that some sort of changeling had overtaken him.

Jamie turned so that he could better read the title of the page. The page was illuminated with a colorful border of flowers, and vines were growing from the enlarged first letter of the title,  _To Provide a Hint_.

"Well." He sat upright again. "I guess that's pretty straightforward."

"Right?" If Mike had a tail, it would be wagging right about now. His enthusiasm was almost cute, not that Jamie would ever tell him to his face. He would never hear the end of it.

Jamie sighed. "Three am, reading magic spells from a shifty old book, sure, what the hell, that's never gone wrong for us before."

He gave it the old college try, despite having never been within two hundred feet of a university in his life, and did his best to read the page out loud.

At this point, he wasn't expecting much of anything to happen, at least not right away, but he still couldn't help feeling impatient as they waited for some sort of clue to fall from the sky. Mike turned the tv on, switching to a news channel in the hopes that something would pop out at them, but unless the hint had to do with the stock exchange, they were shit out of luck there.

"Fuck it, man, I'm tired," Jamie said, standing up and stretching. He was hot, too, having had to make sure he kept his arms covered at all times in fucking  _July_  in an apartment that didn't even have fans, let alone air conditioning.

"We need to get some fans for this place," he said as he shucked off his jacket. It got stuck on his arm, because he was a fucking loser and apparently a toddler to boot, and it took way more effort than should have been necessary to get himself untangled. When he was finally able to throw his jacket to the ground, the contents of its pockets had already been dumped out across the table.

He cursed under his breath as he bent to pick up his wallet and a wad of gum wrappers. When he stood up again, Mike was looking at the book with an expression that was way too thoughtful given that it was Mike and three in the morning and also  _Mike paying attention to a book at three in the morning_.

"Are you okay there buddy?" Jamie nudged his shoulder gently.

Mike grunted, rubbed a hand across his mouth and then pointed at the book.

"Does this seem like it could be meaningful to you?"

Jamie peered down to get a closer look.

In true characteristic fashion, he hadn't emptied his pockets since the last time he washed his jacket (and he couldn't even recall when that was), so whatever garbage he'd been carrying around for months was now all over the table. Most of that was represented by old receipts and loose change, but the only things that had landed on the book were, he realized after a moment, the junk that Nixon had kept insisting on shoving in his pockets "to keep them safe."

A sad, crumpled, dried up daisy was lying draped across the page, and with a start Jamie realized that the flowers making up the border were daisies as well, though ones that were certainly in better shape than the type that rode around in Jamie's pocket for weeks. Next to it, perfectly even and centered in the middle of the page, was a weathered, faded ticket granting the user admission to Colonial Williamsburg.

He heaved a sigh and slumped back against the couch, bringing his hands up to rub at his temples.

"If we're taking the matching flowers to mean something, I guess we're supposed to go there, and, like...look for flowers? Look for something with daisies in front of it? Shit, it's a tourist place, they've got to have so many flowers there. And we have to like, pay to get in, just to look at the flowers?"

"You don't have to pay to walk around most parts."

Jamie rolled his head to the side, only to find Mike slumped next to him, his phone held up over his face, casting a bluish glow over his features.

"You got on google that fast?"

"What can I say, I'm smarter than you. Wait, no, I'm a fucking genius, that's what I am."

Only some fast reflexes that Jamie absolutely refused to attribute to Babe's wartime hyper-vigilance allowed him to catch Mike's phone before it landed on his face. He squinted and held the screen further away so that he could actually read it.

 _Colonial Flowers_  was written across the top of the webpage, surrounded by little white fucking daisies.  _"Located in the heart of Colonial Williamsburg, Colonial Flowers has been providing Williamsburg residents and guests with beautiful flowers and floral arrangements for hundreds of years."_

Jamie groaned and threw an arm over his eyes, using the other to drop Mike's phone unceremoniously on his chest.

" _Ugh_ , I don't want to take more time off to go wandering all over the fucking country."

He jumped when Mike slapped his arm, thankfully at the bicep and not over the list, which still felt sore even after a few weeks.

"I hate to break it to you, Jamie-face, but you have a whole lot of road trips ahead of you if you want to get that list finished any time soon."

"Yeah, but with what money? We can't afford to keep taking off of work, Mikey, we're not exactly flush with cash and I know for a fact that neither of our jobs comes with vacation time."

Mike sighed and somehow sunk further into the sagging cushions.

"Well, yeah, no, we don't, but we're not  _that_  poor. I mean, we have savings. Shit, we still have the road trip fund from that trip we never went on after high school. We saved up for that for  _years_  and I know you still throw your change in a jar to add to it just like you did when we were kids. If we play it safe and stay in cheap motels and do everything on a budget, we could make that stretch for a long time before we have to dip into, like, our life's savings and shit."

Jamie grimaced and shuffled closer to Mike, just enough that he could nudge their shoulders together.

"You had plans for that trip, though," he said quietly. "We were gonna sight-see, go do all the landmarks, Niagara Falls, Mt. Rushmore, the Grand Canyon."

"Yeah, but we can still do some of that stuff some day, or maybe even when we're out looking for the guys! And even if we don't do them now, it's not like the Grand Canyon is going to up and walk away any time soon. We can always save up and go another time. I mean, we'll get there eventually. But right now, we need cash for a road trip, and we have cash that we saved up  _for a road trip_ , and we have friends who need our help...fuck, man, ain't a better use for it."

Part of Jamie's brain stuck on the "friends" part, the part that wanted him to remind Mike that those were  _Babe's_  friends, not his, but he held his tongue. Not only would it likely be very unappreciated, but the sentiment made Jamie feel uneasy with himself.

"Okay, so say we've got the money to take off for a bit. What about work?"

"When do we ever take off work? Be real, here, man."

Jamie had to admit defeat there. Part of John's concern over him was that he had suddenly begun taking days off when he was usually asking for extra shifts, and despite his love of going out drinking and lazy mornings, Mike tended to be much the same. Without any educational aspirations, they didn't have anything to focus on other than trying to build up their savings. They wouldn't get paid for it, but they might be able to argue for some time off.

He sighed. He really shouldn't be looking so hard for reasons  _not_  to go, not when they had what seemed to be a pretty solid clue about where they needed to go next. It was in his best interest, after all, to get this shit done.

"I guess I'll talk to John tomorrow. Today. Whenever the fuck later is."

Mike probably didn't hear all of that, because he was too busy doing some sort of half-crumpled-on-the-couch fist pump that involved way too much kicking his legs out.

"You look like a turtle that got upended."

"Whatever, go the fuck to bed. We have some busy days ahead of us. We need to pack!"

"We're going to Virginia, not fucking overseas."

" _For now_ , we're going to Virginia  _for now_. You never know what the future holds, Jamie-boy."

~~~

They didn't actually leave for a few days. Both of them had to clear things with their bosses first, and wasn't that an uncomfortable conversation. John was now more convinced than ever that something was wrong with Jamie, especially when he said that he wasn't sure how long he would be gone for.

"I guess you have some time off coming to you, kid," he'd said. "But you don't know when you'll be back...?"

It was clear that he was trying to be accommodating, but even Jamie knew that his request was kind of ridiculous.

"As soon as I can," he'd said. "And – and I'll call you, to update you on the timeline. Please, John, we've been wanting to go on a trip for years and it's just never worked out."

"I guess..." John had said, still looking like he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to agree but felt bad saying no. In this case, Jamie tried not to feel too badly playing off of that guilt, and thanked him profusely until he nodded and said, "Well, have fun, then."

He had no clue how Mike had gotten open-ended time off so easily, but he looked far too smug for Jamie to want to indulge him and ask what he'd done.

They held off on informing their families of their trip just yet. "Just until we figure out if we'll actually be gone for a while," Mike insisted, but they both knew he just didn't want to deal with the endless questions. Jamie loved both of their families, but they were worse busybodies than a company of bored paratroopers, and that was saying something.

They decided to leave early on Tuesday morning. It would take a bit less than five hours to get to Williamsburg, so if they left early, they could still have most of the day to visit the flower shop and explore the town.

"We don't even know what we're going to find there," Jamie said sometime around Baltimore. "It could just be more hints and riddles."

"Or maybe the entire goddamn company decided to open up a flower shop together in their new life. We won't know until we get there, will we?"

The only stop they made was for gas, and so they reached Williamsburg in the early afternoon. The tourists were certainly out in full swing, as well as the reenactors.

"God, these people go all out," Mike grumbled as they finally were able to find a parking space and get out of the car. Cars weren't allowed in the historic area and they would have to walk, unless they wanted to shell out cash for a bus (they both immediately scoffed when the woman at the visitor's center who was so desperately trying to sell them tickets made that suggestion).

"It's their livelihood," Jamie said with a shrug as they walked past a pair of women in what had to be sweltering period-accurate dresses. "I guess you have to really act the part."

"Yeah, well let's just hope the flower shop isn't themed too, because you know I hate it when actors try to make you play along with them."

Jamie was well aware of this, because he'd been there when Mike ruined their second grade field trip to Independence Hall by shouting at a tour guide that he wasn't the real Benjamin Franklin and he needed to stop lying to them all. (They didn't even talk about Mike's feelings about the annual nativity play.)

The outside of Colonial Flowers certainly  _looked_  colonial, but then, that was literally a rule of the historic district. There was a plaque outside of the building authenticating its pre-revolutionary age, and when they walked in – well, Mike nearly walked right back out. It was definitely fitting with that authentic colonial theme, with everything from the decor and product displays to, yes, the florist's ensemble.

The one thing that kept Mike from running out and taking Jamie with him was that the florist himself looked a hell of a lot like Popeye Wynn, if Popeye enjoyed wearing breeches with a waistcoat and crisp white leggings.

" _Nooo_ ," Mike was moaning under his breath, sounding something like a deflating duck. Jamie chose to stalwartly ignore him and approached Popeye with his best smile.

"Hello, um..." He glanced around, but there was nothing labeling what his name was now. "...sir."

After having done this a few times, the easiest option, he knew, was a handshake, followed by quickly fleeing the area. Given Mike's continued whining behind him, the fleeing part should be the easiest.

"And hello to you two sirs as well!"

Oh fuck no.

"Oh,  _fuck_  no," Mike said behind him, "We do not play this game, motherfucker."

Popeye – or whatever colonial florist he was now – took a step back in visible surprise. He probably had never received that reaction before.

"We know you're an actor," Mike hissed, taking a step forward. "Everyone knows! This isn't  _real_ , so don't you try to pull your old-timey speech nonsense on me, do you understand me? Because I will  _fuck you up_ , goddamn it, I will-"

Mike didn't get to continue saying what he planned to do, because Jamie grabbed him from behind, threw a hand over his mouth, and physically yanked him backwards.

"I am so sorry," he said, "He gets easily embarrassed by people with good diction. He's jealous, you see, because of his speech impediment."

Popeye's face dawned in understanding. "The underbite."

"Yes."

They couldn't hear what Mike was shouting behind Jamie's hand, but Jamie could imagine it well enough. And he didn't have to imagine what it felt like to have Mike lick his hand. (This was sadly not the first time he'd had that experience, either.)

"You know what, I should really get him out of here, he's going to need time to settle down. So sorry for bothering you, Mr...?"

He stuck out the hand not covering Mike's mouth (and therefore not coated in his saliva) for him to shake.

Popeye gave him a very wary and pretty freaked out look, and said, "I guess that's for the best... Leven. Tate Leven."

He shook Jamie's hand as if he might be the one that ran a risk of biting, when that was clearly more likely to be Mike at this point.

"Tag you so much, Mr. Leven – oh, my allergies are kicking in too, silly me, I forgot I was allergic to flowers and now I'm getting congested, what are we even doing here?"

With that, he bodily yanked Mike backwards out of the flower shop with him and started shoving him down the street.

"You fucker," he hissed, "You almost blew the whole thing! The fuck was that, and with the licking? That was disgusting, what the hell is wrong with you?"

"'Tate,'" Mike grumbled, "The fuck kind of name is that?"

"It's his name, and it doesn't excuse whatever the fuck you thought you were doing. He wasn't even doing an acting bit, he was just being old-timey, you knew what we were walking into, you can't just-"

"Excuse me! Excuse me, Mr...aw, shit, you, with the red hair!"

Jamie, used to being referred as such after a lifetime of remarks about his hair, turned on instinct. Popeye had followed them down the street, waving a sheet of paper after them.

"Hey, man, you dropped this," he said, thrusting the paper out at him.

"Ha! I knew you could talk normal!" Mike thrust a finger in Popeye's direction, which was met with a single raised eyebrow.

Jamie, ignoring him as he was wont to do, had started to say, "No I didn't..." when he caught a better look at the flyer.

"It fell out of your pocket," Popeye was saying, even as Jamie nodded and said, "Oh, wait, yes, this is mine, thank you so much, I can't believe I almost lost it."

Popeye nodded, looking pleased. "Good, I wasn't sure if it was important or not, but I didn't want you to lose it if it was." He glanced sideways at Mike and then added, "Please don't tell anyone I broke character for you, I need this job."

Mike looked ready to protest, but Jamie casually punched him in the kidney and smiled. "Yeah, man, of course."

Popeye took his leave of them then, and Jamie thrust the paper at Mike, who was once again spitting curses.

"Just look at it, dumbass," he said, while sticking a hand in his jacket pocket.

He knew exactly what Mike would see. It was a flyer advertising a fundraiser for the SPCA...in Owensboro, Kentucky. That in and of itself would be weird to find in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, and even weirder to find in, supposedly, Jamie's own pocket. What made it the weirdest of all was that one of the candid photos it featured of people playing with dogs included a man in a purple volunteer t-shirt holding a pair of German Shepherd puppies and looking an awful lot like Floyd Talbert.

"Where the fuck did this come from?" Mike muttered.

"My pocket, apparently," Jamie said with a grim look at his jacket. "And I wouldn't have believed him, except my pocket that this was probably supposed to have come out of? It's the one I put the flower and the ticket back in when we decided to come here."

He met Mike's eyes.

"They're not there anymore."

Mike frowned. "You don't think that somehow..."

Jamie stared at the flyer in their hands, so benign and yet so unbelievable.

"I don't know what to think anymore."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't been to Colonial Williamsburg since I was a kid so I did a lot through google, shoddy memory, and my imagination. You don't need a ticket to enter everything, and most shops are open to everyone without a ticket.
> 
> [Map](https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1759631#) | [Tumblr](https://armypeaches.tumblr.com)


End file.
